BY: ROB HOFFMAN
Sergio Gamberini was somewhere on the sandy beaches of Italy when he was struck with the unusual idea of trying to operate a greenhouse 20 feet under the ocean’s surface. Granted the idea originally comes across as little more than something a stoned oceanography major would day-dream about in their dorm room; four years later, Nemo’s Garden has become the world’s first underwater greenhouse.
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Designed to grow beans, strawberries, basil and lettuce, the five biospheres are anchored to the ocean floor and maintain a temperature of 26°C(79°F) at 83% humidity. Though the first two years of the project were a constant battle with the ocean’s harsh undercurrent, as Sergio’s son, Luca Gamberini tells the Washington Post, “We completely lost the crops four times, but it didn’t really matter because we have such great growth rates.” Today the underwater domes are sturdy and fully operational.
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The reason for Nemo’s Garden’s colossal crop yields is partially due to the high levels of oxygen supplied by the ocean water, allowing the plants to grow at breakneck speeds and might (think Popeye after a few cans of spinach).
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Honouring the idea’s birthplace, Nemo’s Garden is anchored off Italy’s Liguria coast as the environmental branch of Ocean Reef Group, a family-run scuba gear production company with its original headquarters in San Marcos, California. The underwater garden is live-streamed, collecting and displaying information about the biosphere, including the temperature and levels of humidity and oxygen.
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Though environmental concerns are always an important factor—particularly when building artificial habitats in pristine ecosystems—Gamberini is adamant that the initiative is ecologically sound. The family has even spotted multiple octopuses, endangered seahorses and crabs eying the shiny new real estate.
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“This year (2015) we draw the line for feasibility, industrialization, large scale production to really give an alternative solution to grow food in a responsible, small-footprint-on-earth kind of way,” reads a passage from Nemo’s Garden’s About Me page on their website. One potentially game-changing use of this technology would be to operate in countries with dry climates and subpar growing conditions to allow high yields in nations burdened with crop-hexed geology.
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Another interesting idea that Ocean Reef Group is currently looking into, is developing a smaller, household version of their project that would allow people to try this underwater cultivation method at home. Although I imagine this to look somewhat similar to an aquaponics system, it’s tough to speculate what a household version of such a large and intricate system would entail.
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Either way, Nemo’s Garden is a huge technological leap for modern gardening, a scuba addicts wet dream and hopefully a step in the right direction towards the increasing possibility of developing a nation of seal-people.
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Sources: theterramarproject.org, washingtonpost.com
