Two Indian aquanauts achieve historic 5,000-m deep dive in Atlantic Ocean

In a first, two Indian aquanauts have plunged more than 4,000 and 5,000 meters below sea level in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Ministry of Earth Sciences informed on Thursday. This achievement comes weeks after Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla became the first Indian to visit the International Space Station.

Conducted in partnership with France on August 5 and 6, in the French submersible “Nautile”, this marks a step towards India’s Deep Ocean Mission, “Samudrayaan”. A five-member team of National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) comprising Commander Jatinder Paul Singh (retd), Paliniappan, Dr Sathianarayanan, G Harikrishnan, and R Ramesh got hands-on experiences on pre-dive preparatory tasks, dive planning, manoeuvring, and trajectory tracking from the ship.

On August 5, Ramesh, a scientist at NIOT, deep-dived 4,025 meters, and on the following day, Singh became the first Indian to set a record of a 5,003-meter dive. Singh, who hails from Jammu, said it took him 2.5 hours to reach the depth of 5,003 meters. “After reaching the depth, I worked on sampling collection. I wanted to see how the manipulators, which are called robotic arms, work at that depth. I also got to see the visuals deep inside the ocean where even sunlight cannot penetrate. I spent some four hours of operation at the ocean bed. It took 2.5 hours to return to the surface. So I spent almost 10 hours in the operation,” he said.

Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh said that India now joins an elite group of fewer than half a dozen nations to have ventured so deep into the ocean. “The expedition was conducted as a collaborative scientific activity with IFREMER, the French marine research institute. This record-setting dive is a prelude to the activities under India’s Samudrayan Mission, which aims to send three aquanauts to a depth of 6,000 meters in the indigenously developed submersible MATSYA-6000 by 2027,” he added.

Samudrayan is part of the Government of India’s flagship Deep Ocean Mission, launched to explore and sustainably harness deep ocean resources. The Earth Sciences Minister highlighted that India, with a coastline of 11,098 km and a vast Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), holds immense potential for both living and non-living marine resources — offering a natural advantage unmatched by any other country. He called for concerted efforts to explore and tap these unexplored resources to add value to the economy, particularly through the development of the blue economy.

He further noted that India has already signed a contract with the International Seabed Authority for exploring deep-sea minerals at depths ranging from 4,000 to 5,500 meters. NIOT has been entrusted with developing MATSYA-6000. With this submersible, India will become the sixth nation in the world to have developed its own deep-ocean human submersible.

MATSYA-6000 — a first-of-its-kind, fourth-generation scientific submersible — is designed for an operational endurance of 12 hours and an emergency endurance of up to 96 hours. It completed successful wet trials at L&T Shipyard, Kattupalli, Tamil Nadu in January-February 2025 and is expected to undertake 500-meter shallow water trials by 2026.