Oceanography for the day

Liz Welch has an Inc.com article about exploration:

Garnering comparisons to Star Trek's starship Enterprise, the SeaOrbiter is the brainchild of French architect Jacques Rougerie. Set to begin construction in the spring of 2014, the two-hundred-foot-tall semisubmersible vessel will be the culmination of nearly thirty years of Rougerie's research and development.
Six of the SeaOrbiter's twelve floors are below sea level, allowing for uninterrupted underwater observation. Although the ship's main mission is to research the biodiversity and climate of the sea, the real goal for Rougerie is to give the public a better understanding of how crucial the ocean is to the well-being of the Earth.
Ninety-nine percent of the fifty-million-dollar project was financed through the French government and private companies. To get people more involved, Rougerie is crowdfunding the last one percent of the project. "The more humans understand about the underwater world, the more respect they will have for it," he says.
The SeaOrbiter can host 22 people. The ship will carry a mix of scientists and crew members.
"We want people to appropriate the project to themselves," says Rougerie. Which is why he raised money through KissKissBankBank, a French crowdsourcing website, to fund construction of the Eye of the SeaOrbiter. Equivalent to a ship's crow's nest, the Eye towers sixty feet above the surface. It serves as a lookout and houses a communications system that lets the crew send live broadcasts of life on board.
Keeping busy won't be a problem for the crew. The "modular lab" can be used as a laboratory for scientists, as well as a fitness room equipped with treadmills. The lab also includes a medical zone. A certified doctor with basic surgery skills will be on board in the event of an emergency.
The overall weight of the ship is 2600 tons. It is built from five hundred tons of Sealium, a recyclable aluminum designed for marine environments.
Given that voyages will last three to six months, there will be ample time to collect data and perform experiments. The underwater area, known as the hyperbaric lab, is equipped with an observation deck made of transparent polycarbonate panels, allowing for direct underwater observation. Because the conditions underwater are similar to those in space in terms of pressure and isolation, the SeaOrbiter will be used by NASA and ESA (the European equivalent) for protocol training as well as physiological and psychological experiments.
The SeaOrbiter was designed primarily to float along with the ocean's natural currents, allowing scientists to study the relationship between those currents and climate. The keel weighs nearly two hundred tons and helps provide stability to the ship. It can be retracted when the vessel is in shallow water.
The total number of SeaOrbiters that Rougerie eventually hopes to build is five, one to sail in each of Earth's oceans. A number of partners have given their support to the SeaOrbiter project, including National Geographic and UNESCO.

Rico says he hopes his father, the oceanographer, can catch a ride on one of these...