Diving explorer and medical researcher Dr. Joseph Dituri waves to scuba diver Thane Milhoan inside the Jules’ Undersea Lodge, in a Key Largo lagoon, Florida Keys, Florida, U.S., May 13, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
A college professor broke a record for the longest time living underwater with out depressurization this weekend at a Florida Keys lodge for scuba divers.
Joseph Dituri’s 74th day residing in Jules’ Undersea Lodge, located at the backside of a 30-foot-deep lagoon in Key Largo, wasn’t a lot totally different than his earlier days there since he submerged March 1.
Dituri, who additionally goes by the moniker “Dr. Deep Sea,” ate a protein-heavy meal of eggs and salmon ready utilizing a microwave, exercised with resistance bands, did his every day pushups and took an hour-long nap. Unlike a submarine, the lodge doesn’t use expertise to regulate for the elevated underwater stress.
The earlier record of 73 days, two hours and 34 minutes was set by two Tennessee professors — Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain — at the similar location in 2014.
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But Dituri is not simply settling for the record and resurfacing: He plans to remain at the lodge till June 9, when he reaches 100 days and completes an underwater mission dubbed Project Neptune 100.
The mission combines medical and ocean analysis together with academic outreach and was organized by the Marine Resources Development Foundation, proprietor of the habitat.
“The record is a small bump and I really appreciate it,” mentioned Dituri, a University of South Florida educator who holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering and is a retired U.S. Naval officer. “I’m honored to have it, but we still have more science to do.”
His analysis consists of every day experiments in physiology to watch how the human physique responds to long-term publicity to excessive stress.
“The idea here is to populate the world’s oceans, to take care of them by living in them and really treating them well,” Dituri mentioned.
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The outreach portion of Dituri’s mission consists of conducting on-line courses and broadcast interviews from his digital studio beneath the sea. During the previous 74 days, he has reached over 2,500 college students by way of on-line courses in marine science and extra together with his common biomedical engineering programs at the University of South Florida.
While he says he loves living beneath the ocean, there may be one factor he actually misses.
“The thing that I miss the most about being on the surface is literally the sun,” Dituri mentioned. “The sun has been a major factor in my life – I usually go to the gym at five and then I come back out and watch the sunrise.”
