Florida International University has thrown a life preserver to the imperiled Aquarius Reef Base, the world's only operational underwater research station.

The Miami-based school said yesterday that it would step in as the operator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility, located off the coast of Key Largo, Fla. Previously, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, operated the base, but FIU took over after the North Carolina school said it would no longer serve as the base's host institution in the new year.

James Fourqurean, director of FIU's Marine Education and Research Initiative for the Florida Keys, said the university had been looking for a way to expand research and educational opportunities as well as community outreach into the Florida Keys. So FIU was interested when it heard the base was looking for a new host.

The base will allow professors to broadcast talks from the underwater lab, and researchers will be able to communicate with divers on the outside.

"It's a tool that will allow us to bring working scientists in the environment into classrooms," Fourqurean said.

Tom Potts, director of the Aquarius Reef Base, said FIU is a younger institution with a substantial commitment to marine sciences.

"Aquarius can be the big-splash way for them to expand -- and, at least initially, it can be the cornerstone of the Florida Keys expansion," said Potts, who will continue as the facility's director. The five remaining staff members of the lab also will be kept on.

Potts said NOAA has signed a $600,000 continuing resolution cooperative agreement to keep the base running, giving the base half of its funding from last year, through March. FIU had to apply for the funding because it was not the host institution in 2012, Potts said. The grant is delivered through a partnership that FIU is a member of, called the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies.

Potts said $600,000 is barely enough to keep the porthole open.

"We are by no by means out of the woods financially," he said.

Fourqurean said university officials will be looking for new funding streams -- private donors as well as government funding. They also hope to work with private institutions and government agencies that might pay to use the base for research. In the past, NASA has used the base to train astronauts headed into space. The Navy has also used the base.

President Obama's fiscal 2013 proposal scrapped funding for the base altogether. Last summer, a clutch of South Florida Republicans, led by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose congressional district included Key Largo, pushed for the money to be reinstated before the base closed at the end of the year. The congresswoman has scuba dived to the reef base herself on a few occasions (Greenwire, Aug. 28, 2012).

The base is important, Potts said, because it enables researchers to spend as much as 10 days at a time underwater -- allowing for full immersion in their projects. Potts said 2013 marks the 20th year since Aquarius was first deployed. The base has comprehensive data sets since then that show the changes in the reef.

"Aquarius is like ground zero," he said. "It's a neat microcosm of what's happening to coral reefs worldwide."