Southern Ind. company aims to retrieve deep-sea life

GREENVILLE, Ind. – A southern Indiana technology company has won a $400,000 federal contract to develop a submersible chamber for moving deep-sea life from the oceans’ depths to laboratories on the earth’s surface.

Techshot Inc. will use its two-year contract to create a high pressure chamber capable of retrieving animals from as deep as 1.2 miles below the ocean surface.

Scientists who study deep ocean life are hampered in their work because animals that thrive in the crushing pressures of the oceans’ depths cannot survive at the lower pressures of the planet’s surface.

The company based in the Floyd County town of Greenville will develop a prototype specimen chamber that will carry sea animals and water to surface labs at a steady pressure.