 | ||
The Helgoland underwater laboratory (UWL) is an underwater habitat. It was built in Lübeck, Germany in 1968, and was the first of its kind in the world built for use in colder waters.
The 14 meter long, 7 meter wide and 7 meter high UWL meant that divers were able to spend several weeks under water using saturation diving techniques. The scientists and technicians would live and work in the laboratory, returning to it after every diving session. Only once they had reached the end of their stay did they decompress in the UWL itself, being able to then resurface without coming to any harm.
The UWL was used in the waters of the North and Baltic Seas and, in 1975, on Jeffreys Ledge, in the Gulf of Maine along the coast of New England in the USA. At the end of the 1970s it was decommissioned. In the summer of 1998 the German Oceanographic Museum was given the UWL by the GKSS Research Centre, Geesthacht. Nowadays it can be visited at the Nautineum, an outpost of the museum in Stralsund (that Ozeaneum also belongs to).
On September 25, 1975, German aquanaut Joachim Wendler died of an air embolism while returning to the surface of the Gulf of Maine from Helgoland. He was participating in a checkout mission for the First International Saturation Study of Herring and Hydroacoustics (FISSHH) project.