JACQUES Rougerie’s earliest souvenirs are that of the Atlantic Ocean. Born in 1945 in the Ivory Coast where his father worked as a French bio-geographer, he remembers himself facing the rising, unfurling waves while still learning to move forward on his fours.

For the first eleven years of young Jacque’s life, his family shifted from one house to another, each unfailingly facing the sea in full view. “Not only the sight, but the constant, magical symphony of the waves and the smell of the shells and seaweeds forever became part of my life,” he says.

When his parents returned to France in 1956, Rougerie began his studies in oceanography, architecture and fine arts and later launched himself into a brilliant career that took him to the far corners of the earth across the seven oceans where he created some of his most unusual structures. Apart from five sea museums in France, he is internationally reputed for the ones he built in Kobe (Japan), Kochi (India) and Alexandria (Egypt).

Today at age 68, when most of his contemporaries are well settled into easy retirement, Rougerie remains restless because the dream of his lifetime, as he says, remains far from being fulfilled.

The project that he is currently working on day and night will be, when completed, a pragmatic, cost-effective and constantly moving ship immersed in deep waters but with the upper decks, no different from an ordinary vessel, above the sea level. That is the SeaOrbiter.

No wonder the French media call Rougerie “the man with his feet in the water and his head among the stars”. Even his critics, when they refer to his project as a mad take-off from Jules Verne’s classic, “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea”, unknowingly pay him a compliment.

The SeaOrbiter, when completed, will be far from being a science fiction contraption despite its phantasmal appearance. Rougerie insists that humans have already exhausted the earth’s resources and that their future lies in the sea which is seven times larger than dry land. A real challenge before the SeaOrbiter!

At the moment, doing undersea research work is a tedious job that requires submarines and special equipment, not to mention the torpor of taking men and machines down to the bottom of the ocean and bringing them back to the surface that causes, experts say, waste of energy, resources and time, with less than satisfying results.

With the SeaOrbiter researchers will be able to work round the clock studying the bottom of the sea through specially reinforced transparent walls. Going out into the water, getting back in or riding an elevator to the top floors that are permanently in the air will only be a matter of minutes. The recycled aluminum vessel is 58 metres high, 31 of which remain perpetually under water. It will be able to house a team of 22 scientists.

RESEARCH LAB: For reasons of convenience we have so far referred to the SeaOrbiter as ‘ship’ or a ‘vessel’, but in real terms it is an underwater as well as above-the-surface oceanographic research laboratory that weighs a little more than a thousand tons.

Owing to its ingenious architectural structure and powerful propellers, the ten-storey high SeaOrbiter, which does not lie flat on the sea surface like an ordinary ship but rather stands vertically like a stork in water, can move forward, backward or sideways at an incredible speed.

Its high-tech robots can be sent down six thousand metres deep and brought back in no time.

The first model of the SeaOrbiter, which will cost 50 million euros, is being constructed to study traces of lost civilisations buried deep into the Mediterranean, as well as so far unknown sub-ocean life forms. But Rougerie plans to build more models and explore all the oceans of the earth.

A loner’s dream soon to become reality at the French St. Nazaire port famed for its naval constructions, the project has immense national and international backing. Apart from French astronauts Jean-Loup Crétien and Jean-François Clervoy, the US oceanographer Sylvia Earle and the American astronaut Bill Todd who had become a world celebrity in 2001 by launching his NEEMO (Nasa Extreme Environment Mission Operation) have already declared they will be among the first to board the SeaOrbiter on its maiden voyage.

What is most singular is the fact that despite the grandiosity of his project Jacque Rougerie refuses to abandon his dreamer’s identity. “If young people today are so indifferent to the sea, it is our own fault,” he says.

“It’s for the older generation to make children look at the sea as an inexhaustible adventure and not merely a place where the fish come from.”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris. ZafMasud@gmail.com