THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Indian scientists begin an ambitious project to explore the seabed. Inside India’s Deep Ocean Mission to extract resources from the seabed

- SANDEEP UNNITHAN

SOMETIME IN 2024, ABOARD a research vessel in the mid-Indian Ocean, three Indian scientists will board a yellow titanium submersible called the Matsya 6000. This 25-tonne vessel, named after Lord Vishnu’s fish avatar and roughly the size of a minivan, will then be hoisted offthe ship and dropped into the water to begin its journey to the ocean depths. Tethered to its mothership by a cable, Matsya will descend well past the 100 metre mark, beyond which sunlight does not penetrate and the ocean becomes as dark as a tar pit. The vessel’s rapid descent will continue for around four hours, after which it will land on the Indian Ocean floor. The water pressure at this depth— 600 atmospheres—is roughly equivalent to the weight of an elephant per square inch. From inside the cramped confines of the submersible, the scientists will turn on Matsya’s outer lights to illuminate the pitch dark, and move about the sea floor for around six hours, studying the environment through acrylic viewports and using crablike robotic arms to scoop up samples.

This will be India’s first crewed underwater mission. It will make India only the sixth country, after the US, Japan, France, Russia and China, to deploy such deep-diving manned submersibles. Uncrewed NIOT (National Institute of Ocean Technology) machines have already visited these depths in the past. Between March and April this year, the NIOT ship ORV Sagar Nidhi deployed the Varaha-1 robot into the central Indian Ocean. The tracked, mini tank-like vehicle crawled the seabed at a depth of 5,270 metres for its mission to study the polymetallic nodules found here. This was the deepest dive by an Indian machine so far. The