By: John Markoff An international team of archaeologists plans to return this month to the site of an ancient shipwreck off a Greek island. This time, they will have the aid of an advanced diving suit that will give them much more time to probe for new artefacts. Part robot and part submarine, the lightweight suit, called the Exosuit, is intended to allow a diver to work for long periods at depths of more than 1,000 feet, avoiding time-consuming decompression periods. The suit provides a diver with freedom of movement because of a propulsion system and from an unusual set of rotating joints developed by Phil Nuytten, an explorer and diving technology specialist. Evocative of the Iron Man movies and their hero, Tony Stark, the aluminum-alloy suit allows the operator to sit on a bicycle-type seat. It is connected to the surface by a high-speed fiber-optic network that relays high-definition video, and it has robotic grippers that allow divers to manipulate artefacts found at the site. The Exosuit has a self-contained life-support system designed to allow divers to work as long as 2 1/2 days without surfacing, though at first, the shifts will be much shorter. Its rotary joints are extremely resilient; the smallest, at the wrist, can withstand up to six tonnes of pressure on a small surface area, Nuytten said. “You feel like you are in a segmented suit of armour,” said Brendan P Foley, an archaeologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and a director of the shipwreck project who tested the suit this summer. “I was imagining I was going to feel like Tony Stark, but I felt a lot like Lancelot.” Nuytco (pronounced NEWT-co), a company founded by Nuytten, has made similar atmospheric diving suits for rescue operations for many of the world’s navies. The shipwreck, off the island of Antikythera, was discovered by Greek divers in 1900. A Roman vessel that is believed to have sunk during the first century BC, it held the renowned Antikythera Mechanism, a mechanical device for predicting celestial movement, along with luxury goods like pottery and bronze statues. Since the original discovery, the Antikythera wreck was explored only once — by Jacques Cousteau for several weeks in 1976 — until the fall of 2012, when a team of divers from Woods Hole and a Greek government agency, the Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, began a more systematic exploration. But the project is as much about experimenting with new diving technology as it is about field archaeology, said David A Mindell, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has specialised in marine systems. This is the third year the divers will operate at the site. On each expedition, they have added advanced technologies. Previously, they used closed-circuit rebreathers — devices that scrub carbon dioxide from exhaled breath, allowing the diver to inhale it again — and diver propulsion vehicles equipped with high-resolution cameras. Because of the depth of the wreck, even with those systems, divers were limited to just 30 minutes of exploration. Foley said he hoped the Exosuit would be used for up to three dives a day during the month-long expedition, with each dive lasting three hours. A group of divers will share the Exosuit, with others using equipment that requires decompression. NYT
