Initially scanning tunneling microscopes were used routinely to scan in liquids, and as Marti et. al. pointed out in their publication1; "The STMs may be operated under water and aqueous solutions, and there is no fundamental difficulty in adding the spring and tip for an AFM."
This study shows that in fact there is no fundamental difficulty in adding the spring and a tip to do AFM studies with the sample submerged in a liquid; especially with the liquid cell probes.