No this ship isn't sinking, this is FLIP aka the Floating Instrument Platform. The aged research vessel was recently saved from the scrapyard. Veuer’s Tony Spitz has the details.
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00:00No, this ship isn't sinking. This is FLIP, aka the Floating Instrument Platform.
00:05And this is what it does. The boat has a mechanism to sink the majority of its 355-foot-long deck
00:11underwater, with the whole vessel turning 90 degrees to let researchers observe underwater
00:16habitats without the need for submarines. The ship was operated by the U.S. Navy's
00:20Office of Naval Research for 50 years, until it was decommissioned in 2023.
00:24That's when it was on its way to a scrapyard in Mexico.
00:27However, subsea development firm Deep has now saved the aged vessel and transported
00:32the whole thing to the Mediterranean, where it will live on. With the company's CEO saying about
00:36the rescued maritime icon, FLIP is from a time of bold engineering and optimism for our future
00:42and our oceans, an ethos Deep shares and seeks to embody. Our mission is perhaps equally bold,
00:47to make humans aquatic by enabling our species to live, work, and thrive underwater.
00:52They're now updating the vessel and are set to relaunch it as part of their fleet in 2026.
00:57They add that it will be key in future endeavors to build human habitats offshore,
01:01with several research groups already in line to use FLIP.