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Terry Kerby’s job takes him to places natural light can’t touch.

Kerby’s submarine voyages have taken him more than a mile below the ocean’s surface. He has discovered lost wartime relics, including demolished aircraft and torpedoes lodged in the sea floor.

He recently discovered a from World War II that the U.S. Navy seized and then sunk in 1946. The rusted vessel is near Oahu’s southwestern coast, 2,300 feet below the water’s surface.

Kerby has witnessed vast kaleidoscopic coral forests and active volcanoes spewing jets of liquid carbon dioxide. He has watched, up close, as the heat from volcanoes melted his gear.

But the real threat to his work is on dry land. Changing funding priorities threaten to put an end to undersea exploration by submarines with people in them.

That Sinking Feeling

Kerby, 64, is the University of Hawaii’s veteran undersea explorer, overseeing all of its submarine operations. He’s led — and piloted — the university’s undersea explorations since 1981, when the established its research laboratory thanks to a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s just a passion of mine — going to the bottom,” he says.

The has conducted nearly 1,900 dives totaling 9,300 hours underwater over the past three or so decades. That amounts to more than an entire year of humans engaging in research underwater.

have resulted in the discovery of the historic World War II Japanese midget submarine. He collaborated on groundbreaking research on the new Hawaiian island that is growing east of the Big Island and played a key role in breakthrough findings on monk seal habitats that have facilitated conservation efforts.

But the laboratory is too short on funds to function properly. John Wiltshire, the lab’s director, says the program is in danger of permanently shutting down. The problem: it no longer gets funding from NOAA which until recently accounted for $1.5 million of the lab’s $2 million annual operating budget. When NOAA ended its National Undersea Research Program in 2012, all funding for its submarine expeditions ceased.

At Home Beneath the Sea

Human-operated submarine vehicles are gradually being replaced by remotely operated vehicles — think of them as drones, but under water. (Here is .

And as federal funding for subs with people inside of them has dried up, the university’s ability to keep the human-operated submarines in operation has shriveled, Kerby said.

On a recent morning at the test facility where much of the university’s submarine and undersea equipment is stored — a rusty, salt-encrusted warehouse on the Makai Pier near Makapuu — Kerby snakes through the metal equipment and suspended parts, reciting memories of his expeditions.

He recalls the scientific names of the organisms he has collected, the length of the ships he’s traveled on, and the exact cost and date of the operations he has overseen.

The ocean is Kerby’s second home, a place where he doesn’t recall ever being scared for his life.

“I’d say that, over the decades, I’ve had my share of inconveniences,” said Kerby, who started piloting submersibles at age 28. “But the most nerve-wracking thing for me right now is keeping these subs diving.”

He then slid effortlessly through the hatch and into , a small submarine stored in the warehouse. There, he closed the hatch and his voice echoed within the confines of the tiny, 10-foot-wide sphere.

The vehicle’s vessels inner walls are lined with knobs and switches, as well as some quality of life elements, like a box of Kleenex and a fan.

Kerby demonstrated the typical submarine setup, laying chest-down on a blue cushion in the middle. He could see out three circular windows the size of large grapefruits toward the sunlit pier. On dives, Kerby is usually in that same place, but sandwiched between two researchers, with the team observing the marine abyss, their foreheads pressed against padding above the windows.

Kerby explained that the researchers often wear bandanas around their heads, to give their faces some extra cushioning, in dives that often last eight hours each. Some trips last up to 16 hours.

A Disappearing Breed

As a boy living next to a lake in California’s Sierra Nevadas, near Yosemite, Kerby always longed to see — and explore — the ocean. Jacques Cousteau was a great inspiration. After studying geology and art in college, Kerby joined the Coast Guard in 1970, later for his nighttime rescue of two people trapped beneath a capsized boat in waters off of Puerto Rico.

Kerby’s life changed when he moved to Hawaii in 1976 to harvest precious corals for the Maui Divers Jewelry company. After that commercial operation folded in 1979, the university hired Kerby as chief pilot of its brand-new undersea research laboratory.

“Now, instead of devastating those (coral) trees, we were collecting and studying them,” Kerby said.

Kerby’s artistic past comes across as he describes the coral, his eyes lighting up as he details the marine invertebrates colors and shapes. In fact, Kerby has portrayed many of his expeditions — soaring sea cliffs, curious grouper fish, mammoth golden coral trees and the like — in available on the research laboratory’s website. The images offer windows into other-worldly experiences that might otherwise be difficult to capture.

Kerby worries that those images may be among the last vestiges of his trips to the bottom of the sea — especially now that his team of five is also required to oversee the remotely operated vehicle operations, too. Without the NOAA funding, the university doesn’t have any money to pay for human-accompanied dives, which cost about $40,000 a day, he said. Remote vehicle dives can cost roughly $50,000 a day, but they ultimately prove to be more cost effective in many instances.

NOAA terminated the National Undersea Research Program when it reorganized its budget priorities in the 2013 fiscal year, according to agency spokesman Scott Smullen. The agency’s goal was to preserve resources and increase NOAA’s investments in “cutting-edge, innovative exploration technology,” he said.

The university is actively seeking funding from other sources to continue its human-driven work. For now it is surviving thanks to private donors, small contracts, grants from other NOAA programs and general university funds, according to Wiltshire, the lab’s director.

The only dive they have planned is part of an international expedition to try to locate Amelia Earhart’s airplane in Nikumaroro, in the southwest Pacific Ocean just north of Samoa, this fall. The expedition will mark the eighth time the group of explorers have attempted to find the plane’s remains.

Human-operated submarines such as the Pisces are “like this really graceful hot air balloon that can just hang there perfectly,” he said. “You can get in irregular, unstable terrain and hang inches away from it.”

Despite that, he said, “it’s a real battle selling the idea that these submersibles are really valuable to this work and that they really have a place.”

Smullen, of NOAA, said the remotely operated vehicles are often more suitable when it comes to exploring the “unknown reaches of the ocean,” while human-operated subs are preferable for research on “specific, relatively well-known” locations.

Human-operated vehicles are time-limited, Smullen added, in terms of their power and life-support capabilities.

Beyond that, he said, “Costs are significant due to safety systems and safety margins necessary to mitigate the potential risks inherent to personnel traveling to deep ocean depths.”

Nostalgia for the Deep

Inside the submarine at the Makai Pier, Kerby was nostalgic. The very experience of descending below the water’s surface is surreal, he explained. In a period of minutes, he said, as you drop through the water column, you can trek past clusters of bioluminescent creatures that look like “explosions of fireworks.”

The creatures are among Kerby’s favorite parts of his work. He’s had his submarine pushed around by roaming six-foot-long Sevengill sharks and seen curious, big-lipped groupers push their faces right up against his vehicle’s windows.

On a coral research expedition in the northwestern Hawaiian islands, Kerby and his team discovered monk seals 1,780 feet below sea level, deeper than researchers at the time thought the animals could go. As it turned out, the monk seals forage for food in the ancient colossal gold coral forests a third of a mile down.

The discovery prompted the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council to of precious coral harvesting at seal forage sites.

While direct access to the undersea world is shrinking for him and his team, and while historic maritime expeditions have become less and less of a priority, partly as a result of the budget cuts, the discovery of the Japanese midget submarine in 2002 did help to galvanize support behind such efforts.

The next goal, he said, is to find one of the i400’s counterparts — the 300-foot-long i203, which was torpedoed and sunk by the USS Caiman.

“That’s the ultimate needle in the haystack,” Kerby said. “But it’s slipping away from us because there’s no money to continue support dives.”