Joe Dituri, also known as Dr. Deep Sea, has lived up to his name. Photo: Instagram@Drdeepsea
Joseph Dituri, a university professor who goes by the nickname “Dr. Deep Sea,” has just lived up to his moniker. Dituri recently broke the world record for the longest time living underwater without depressurization. He spent 74 days in Jules’ Undersea Lodge, a sort of underwater hotel that requires guests SCUBA dive into their rooms.
The lodge is 30-feet deep, sitting at the bottom of the Emerald Lagoon in Key Largo, Florida. It is, as you’d suspect, the only underwater hotel in the United States.
Dituri went underwater on March 1, hoping to beat the record set at the same location in 2014 by by two Tennessee professors named Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain. They spent 73 days, two hours, and 34 minutes under the surface of the ocean. The lodge doesn’t use any sort of technology to adjust for the water pressure, so it’s an ideal place to study the effects of pressure on the human body.
Although Dituri has broken the record, he’s not going anywhere just yet. He plans to stay there until June 9, which will put him at 100 days. He’s not just down there twiddling his thumbs and watching the clock, though. It’s part of a project that looks at how the human body responds to long-term and extreme pressure.
“The record is a small bump and I really appreciate it,” said Dituri. “I’m honoured to have it, but we still have more science to do. The idea here is to populate the world’s oceans, to take care of them by living in them and really treating them well.”
As a part of the project, Dituri is leading online classes and doing interviews from his deep-sea studio. So far, he’s interacted with some 2,500 students studying marine science, as well as other courses.
To keep himself sane, Dituri sticks to a strict schedule that includes a high-protein diet, a rigorous exercise routine, a daily hour-long nap, and a whole pile of research. One might think that, since Dituri is alone down there, the thing he misses most is human contact. But it’s not.
“The thing that I miss the most about being on the surface is literally the sun,” Dituri said. “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.”
