At present,the marine emergency communication mainly focuses on the surface part and rarely involves the underwater part,which cannot meet the requirements of underwater emergency. Therefore,the underwater emergency communication is discussed in this paper. First,a variety of possible application scenarios are analyzed,and the basic requirements and performance measurements are discussed. Secondly,the system architecture is discussed from the aspects of network topology,working mechanism and node types. Then,the key technologies are described,including multi-mode communication and functional integration of nodes,rapid mobile deployment of network,rapid switching of network modes,and joint integration of underwater and water surface, etc. Finally,the machine learning and meta-learning methods that can be used in intelligence are introduced,and the ideas of intelligent underwater emergency communication are discussed.