down in the deep
Shanee stopnitzky has one goal: to make deep-sea exploration available to all.
Four thousand dollars, a few propane tanks and a coat of paint is all you need to visit the depths of the oceans. At least, that’s the case if you’re Shanee Stopnitzky, marine scientist and director of the Community Submersibles Project: a volunteer initiative focused on making deep-sea exploration accessible to those of us with faded childhood dreams of becoming a marine biologist.
Only a few years old, the California-based project is the culmination of a string of happy coincidences. “I’d been known in my community for building weird watercrafts,” Shanee says, like an ‘art boat’ named Artemiid – a kinetic sculpture that glowed with light, shot blue fire, and was modelled on an aquatic life form. (Picture a Burning Manstyle float intended for water.) “Then, somebody saw a submarine for sale on a Facebook ad in Michigan and they tagged me, thinking it would be funny,” Shanee continues. Little did they know, she had just returned from her first submarine dive in Honduras, where she’d learnt that the mechanics of the vessels were more accessible than she’d previously assumed. Shanee experienced profound moments during that dive, and was inspired to make that feeling available to as many people as possible, via a public-access training program for sub pilots – the first of its kind.
With $4000, Shanee purchased a cute, homemade submersible watercraft built from propane tanks and named it after one of the gnarliest fish in the ocean: Fangtooth. (While a submarine is a fully autonomous craft, a submersible tends to be smaller and less powerful, usually supported by another vessel at the surface.) The Community Submersibles Project uses Fangtooth, a two-person sub, and Noctiluca, a larger submersible painted to look like a killer whale, to explore up to 90 metres of the deep sea – or “inner space”, as Shanee calls it. “It feels like a version of space that we can access,” she explains. “It has the perspective expansion space has, but we can take these vehicles there and it’s full of life. It imparts the same degree of wonder, I think, as going to outer space, but it’s here and we can look at it and visit very, very alien life forms.” Imparting a sense of wonder is the goal underpinning the entire grassroots project. “We're trying to give people this first-person experience, restoring the popular imagination around subs,” Shanee says. “Until now, these experiences have been afforded only to government-sponsored researchers, the military or the very wealthy, but actually, submersibles are way more accessible than spaceships.” The Community Submersibles Project team are hunting for artists to give the watercrafts a creative new coat of paint, as well, making the vessels even more welcoming and emphasising “the softness and fundamental spiritedness of these experiences”.
Shanee and her crew of volunteer makers, mechanics and engineers have been toiling away on the subs to ensure their safety for deep-sea travel, and are currently putting a curriculum together for the first group of ocean enthusiasts they hope to train later this year. “We’re really, really careful and our team is full of incredibly bright people who know what they’re doing, but we still run things by experts in the field, just to make sure,” Shanee says. “For now, the people piloting our subs are a small, self-taught crew.” The team will soon host community events to bring new people on board, training them as pilots and providing hands-on coaching in submersibles mechanics and operations. They’re ultimately planning to use an ‘each one teach one’ philosophy – if you can pilot, you can teach another person to pilot, too. “We’ll have systematic training methods so people aren’t working on something when they haven't proven
their skill mastery,” Shanee says. “But we’re aiming to bring people in and grow the community.”
That sense of community has been important to Shanee from the very beginning – this is a project for everyone, not just her own gains. Kickstarter campaigns have helped fund important technical upgrades and repairs for the subs. By paying a special membership fee, trained pilots can become part-owners of the Noctiluca, which grants them access to the vessel for any non-commercial, exploratory purpose. And full documentation of the project and related findings will be available via an open-source platform online. In the long run, Shanee hopes the model will be replicated in other parts of the world, creating an accessible network of privately owned subs.
An adventure deep below the ocean surface is safer than you might expect. (A note on the Community Submersibles Project’s FAQ page assures us that no one is about to run out of air or get crushed under the weight of the water.) For one, the vessels have been designed by serious engineers and fitted with life-support systems, and there’s a commitment to safety before and during any dive, with various checklists and technical rituals in place. Plus, the training curriculum is rigorous in its detail, modelled on aviation courses with simulations, fundamental theory and practice dives. “It’s elaborate and feels really overwhelming sometimes, but as soon as I get below the surface, I feel completely calm,” Shanee says. “It gets very peaceful suddenly with the subs, and stops being scary at that point.”
Nature’s soothing effect is a constant source of inspiration for artists and scientists alike. In her 1899 novel, The Awakening, Kate Chopin wrote: “the voice of the sea speaks the soul.” At its core, the Community Submersibles Project (and Shanee’s broader marine work) is about life – wrangling your head around the complexity and diversity of what’s out there. “It's really easy to frame our existence with what we're able to perceive easily on our daily routes,” she says. “What’s actually possible is way, way bigger, though, especially once you start getting into the deep sea.” A startling fact: 71 per cent of our planet is made up of ocean, and 95 per cent of those oceans remain unexplored.
It’s hard to ignore existential thoughts when witnessing life from such a different angle. Shanee recalls the most beautiful thing she’s seen so far, on that maiden submarine dive in Honduras. At approximately 500 metres below the surface, the pilot flashed camera strobes at the water, causing chemical bioluminescence to activate in the organisms around them. Their world glowed with psychedelic patterns, resembling cracks across the water, squares spinning into infinity and dazzling dots. “It was this incredibly dense soup of absolutely magical creatures, and my brain extrapolated that to the whole ocean,” Shanee says. “I was very overwhelmed and had a spiritual experience in that moment, knowing that these supposed ‘deserts’ were completely full of life."
As for her favourite group of marine organisms, that honour goes to the siphonophores: a colony of distinct creatures that attach to each other, acting as one. “The deep-sea versions are so bizarre,” Shanee laughs. “There are some organisms that do the stinging, some that do the digesting, some that do the swimming, and that’s completely unique.” Each creature performs a different physiological function, but they move through the ocean as a single unit. With a bit of time, perhaps the Community Submersibles Project will behave much like the siphonophores: a group of ocean enthusiasts seamlessly and collectively moving through inner space.