Undersea living: Alumna joins Cousteau mission
What’s it like living on the bottom of the ocean in a habitat no bigger than a school bus for more than two weeks? Nicer than you might think, according to Grace Young ’14. “It was comfortable. I felt like I could have a vacation house underwater,” the mechanical and ocean engineering alumna says of her stint with Fabien Cousteau’s "Mission 31." In her blog, "Grace Under Pressure," Young described her 15 days in Florida International University’s Aquarius habitat as an aquanaut with Mission 31. The mission’s purpose was to raise awareness of climate change, ocean pollution, and overconsumption of resources while facilitating experiments and research unique to the underwater marine laboratory. Young and her fellow aquanauts spent their days in saturation diving — a style of diving that allows for multiple hours of submersion, due to living in a pressurized environment like Aquarius — and assisting with research. Extended dive times and the established...