At the United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit, a team of divers conducted the world's first successful saturation dive in 1963. The subjects lived and worked for six days at a depth of 100 feet (30.5 meters) in a helium-oxygen atmosphere, proving that the human body could become saturated with inert gases and that decompression time could be managed predictably.

The success of saturation diving, a triumph of physiological and engineering knowledge, opened the door to a new era of deep-sea work and habitation. This achievement, and the aquanauts who pushed the boundaries of human endurance, inspired poets and writers to explore themes of isolation, endurance, and the human relationship with the alien environment of the deep, from the existentialist poetry of the 1960s to the contemporary works of deep-sea ecopoets.