Diving | John Clarke Online

Diving with Hydrogen – It’s a Gas

When most people think of hydrogen, they think of the fuel that stars burn in their nuclear fires, the hydrogen bomb, or the Hindenburg disaster. Hydrogen is known for its combustibility and explosiveness. Not many people would think of diving underwater with it.

Technical divers breathe various gas blends, using mixtures of nitrogen, oxygen and even helium. But leave it to the ever inventive Swedes, makers of some of the best diving equipment in the world, to use hydrogen as an experimental diving gas as early as the 1940s.

Hydrogen will not burn under two conditions; if there is too little hydrogen, or too much hydrogen and not enough oxygen. A gas mixture (air or oxygen) with less than 4% hydrogen will not burn, and with more than 94% hydrogen in oxygen (or 75% hydrogen in air), the gas mixture will also not burn. So 100% hydrogen will not burn, unless it leaks out of its container and gets diluted in air. And then if there is an ignition source, woosh, a la Hindenburg.

A diver with supposed nitrogen narcosis. Photo credit, Daniel Kwok on flickr.

So why would anyone consider breathing hydrogen? When diving deeper than a few meters, you need a so-called diluent gas to mix with oxygen. Air is a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, and when compressed, that nitrogen becomes narcotic, leading to nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the deep”. When air is compressed it also becomes dense, making it more difficult to breathe than air is at the surface.

Helium, often used by deep diving Navy and technical divers, is less dense than nitrogen and therefore is easier to breathe at depth. Furthermore, it is not narcotic, so no more “rapture of the deep”.

But for seriously deep diving, greater than about 450 msw (~1500 fsw), even a mixture of helium and oxygen becomes dense enough to impede breathing. One solution is to use an even lighter gas, hydrogen.

Experimental hydrogen-helium-oxygen gas mixtures have been used by COMEX in France to slightly exceed, at 2290 fsw (701 msw), the U.S. deep diving record (2250 fsw, 686 msw) set using a mixture of helium, nitrogen and oxygen.

Hydrogen has one annoying property — it is narcotic. It is far less narcotic than hyperbaric nitrogen, and some narcosis seems to be necessary to counteract the deleterious effects of the High Pressure Nervous Syndrome (HPNS). However, unlike nitrogen narcosis, which is akin to mild alcohol intoxication, hydrogen narcosis is reported to be psychotropic, inducing at great depth altered realities akin to those produced by LSD.

I once was conducting medical research on a 450 msw dive at the German GUSI deep diving chamber, and one of the divers was a French diver who had been a subject on the French hydrogen dives. He reported, without going into detail, that he did not like the effects of hydrogen at all. It was strange, he said. On the other hand, the same diver did very well on the helium-nitrogen-oxygen gas mixture used at GUSI and Duke University.

That some exotic gases on deep experimental dives would be considered strange is an understatement. Deep hydrogen has been reported to produce out of body experiences, something that a person as well grounded as a professional diver would consider frighteningly bizarre.

Z without — Swedish diver Arne Zetterström

The Swedes, and Arne Zetterström in particular, were interested in hydrogen diving during World War II for a simple reason; they wanted to dive deep, without the effects of nitrogen narcosis, but did not have access to helium. Most helium comes from gas wells in the United States and Russia. So, looking for another diluent gas other than helium, Zetterström briefly considered two constituents of intestinal gas (flatus), namely methane and hydrogen. Arguably, it was easy for the Swedes to produce plenty of methane and hydrogen. Just how they planned to do that is something I never asked.

Eventually, hydrogen was chosen for the Swedish dives simply because hydrogen was less dense than methane.

In principle, hydrogen could be used by a deep technical diver, but only at depths deeper than 132 fsw (5 atmospheres), a depth which would turn the noncombustible 4% oxygen in hydrogen gas mix into a so-called normoxic gas mixture, meaning it would have about as many oxygen molecules per breath as air at the surface. If the diver attempted to come shallower on that same gas mixture, he would lose consciousness due to hypoxia.

Since helium is not a combustible gas it does not have gas mixture restrictions. As long as a helium-oxygen gas mixture contains the right amount of oxygen (not too much and not too little), then it will be safe. Both nitrogen and helium are therefore far preferred over either of the flammable gases methane and hydrogen for use in breathing gas mixtures for diving.

Nevertheless, as divers continue to explore ways of diving deeper, it is certainly possible that hydrogen and other exotic gases may eventually play a role in deep life-support. Who knows, perhaps a perfect gas mixture will involve a blend of hydrogen and methane along with oxygen. If so, perhaps we could call it, oh I don’t know, maybe … Flatogen!

Computer Simulation as Art — or Rorschach Test

No one has ever confused me for an artist.

I might have been visually gifted as a 3rd-grader, as my parents told it, at least compared to my peers. However, I never seemed to progress beyond that point. I think my progress slowed about the time I saw my first Rorschach test.

I realized then that some people’s art is someone else’s diagnosis. After all, it is no fun to look at an ink blot abstraction, to voice an opinion about it, only to have an authority figure nod his head and write in his notebook as he says, “I see,” when obviously he didn’t.

Clinical trauma aside, I now know that all humanity looks instinctively for visual patterns and searches for meaning in patterns whether they be random or not. There is a survival aspect to that of course; if we detect a tiger’s stripes partly hidden in a confused background of woodland scenery, that offers a potential survival benefit.

Sometimes, even the most mundane things turn out to be “pretty”. Such were the images I saw being formed on my computer screen the other day. The more I looked at them, the more interesting they became. They were like my own Rorschach test, in a very literal way. They were random patterns based on random processes, but my brain refused to look at them that way. They appeared to me as images of natural things, representing anything except what they truly were.

The image to the left, for instance, looked to me like a view through a telescope of a star field with at least one galaxy situated near the center axis.

Or in a very biological way, it might be the view through an immunofluorescence microscope.

The next image looked to me like a view of a placid star seen in ultraviolet light. I could almost feel the blistering heat radiating through space.

Alternatively, it might be a view of a human egg waiting patiently for fertilization, an altogether different interpretation, but like the first, being a necessary component of creation.

The final image looked to me like a cooler star but with clearly visible solar prominences, magnetic storms arcing over the hellish nuclear surface.

I have no idea what others might see in these images, if anything, but I’m guessing each image can be interpreted differently based on one’s own life experiences.

And that after all is the whole point of art, and Rorschach tests.

The above images were created as part of a random, or stochastic, simulation of rebreather scrubber canisters. They are a view of the upstream end of an axial canister, and shows the state of the canister as heat producing carbon dioxide absorption reactions are beginning.

The cooler looking the canister, the less the amount of exhaled carbon dioxide entering the canister.

The simulation tracks chemical reactions and heat and mass transfer processes in an array of 272,000 finite elements making up a simple absorbent canister. Slicer Dicer and 3VO software (PIXOTEC, LLC) were used to visualize the three-dimensional data set acquired during one moment in time shortly after the simulated reactions began.

Another Rebreather Scrubber Thermokinetic Simulation

Compared to the previously posted video of a segment of a rebreather scrubber, this video shows a much larger, and therefore more realistic scrubber with axially aligned, CO₂rich gas flow passing from left to right. Due to the larger size of the simulation space, more widely distributed heat patterns are noticeable, as are fluctuations in heat. The flow of those fluctuations are most noticeable along the simulated boundary of the cylindrical scrubber bed.

The assumptions of this simulation are that CO₂production (diver workload) is constant throughout the simulation run, ventilatory flow through the canister is constant, the surrounding water temperature is constant at 50° F, and the canister was chilled to the water temperature before the “diver” started breathing through it.

The previous simulation conditions were similar except that the canister was toasty warm prior to immersion in frigid water.

To fully appreciate the fine detail of the imagery, click on the video frame then expand the video to full screen size (lower right symbol immediately after “You Tube”) and play back in 1080p High Definition mode.

A Look Inside Rebreather Scrubber Canisters, Part 2

Computer modeling allows you to see things that are invisible in real life.

The previous posting showed the complex thermal profiles generated in a rebreather canister found in closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus during the CO₂ absorption process. But heat generation is just part of the absorption process. Simulation allows you to see how the end product of CO₂ absorption, calcium carbonate, gets deposited inside the canister.

To the right is calcite, a form of calcium carbonate. Divers never see crystals of calcite in the scrubber canister because sodalime granules are never completely converted to calcite. Typically, no more than 50% of the granules react completely with exhaled CO₂.

The following images show the interior of a a scrubber canister as the sodalime granules begin reacting with exhaled CO₂. When sodalime granules first begin to absorb CO₂ the image becomes purple. With more CO₂the color turns reddish, and when all binding sites are filled with reacted CO₂, the granule color becomes yellow.

The more carbonate in a particular location in the granule bed, the more yellow the image.

The probability that an exothermic absorption reaction would occur is dependent on the granule temperature, the granule size, the number of granules and the number of sites available for reaction in each granule.

In the second image, CO₂ absorption sites in the inlet to the canister were completely filled (thus showing yellow), and small pockets of absorption were extending up the canister walls.

When I saw the third computer-generated image, I was surprised. It showed that in the central portion of the absorbent bed, the moving thermal front seen in the previous post was leaving behind a calcited bed. However, sheets of calcium carbonate were forming on the outer surface of the canister, the coldest portion of the canister.

Initially that result was counter-intuitive. Then I realized that low temperature makes the odds very low that the first granule encountered would absorb CO₂. All chemical reaction rates are temperature dependent, therefore exhaled CO₂ would be very likely to proceed downstream to the next granule. There again the odds of being absorbed would be low so the CO₂molecule would continue downstream.

However, given enough opportunities, even low probability events eventually occur. That means that along the cold canister walls, carbonate begins to be deposited much further downstream than in the warmest, and most highly reactive portion of the bed.

Unfortunately, the low probability of CO₂absorption in cold granules means that CO₂ hugging the cold canister walls is likely to pass completely through the canister, unabsorbed. Chances are also high that the same molecule would be shunted to a different portion of the canister on its second pass through the canister, and therefore would eventually be reabsorbed.

The following link is to a high definition video showing carbonate deposition in a cylindrical scrubber canister as the simulated diver plunges into icy water. For best effect go to full screen and 1080p mode.

Further details about the computer simulation involved in the production of these images and video can be found in the paper “Computer Modeling of the Kinetics of CO2 Absorption in Rebreather Scrubber Canisters”, in MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2001 Conference Proceedings, published by the Marine Technology Society; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Oceanic Engineering Society (U.S.); IEEE Xplore (Online service).

A Look Inside Rebreather Scrubber Canisters, Part 1

If you’re diving a rebreather (closed-circuit breathing apparatus to be exact), then you know the scrubber removes carbon dioxide from your recirculated breath. Without the scrubber working, you’d go unconscious from carbon dioxide intoxication within a very few minutes of starting the dive.

But do you really know what’s going on inside that scrubber canister?

A stochastic computer simulation developed by the author gives as realistic a glimpse inside as we can get.

Loose granular and rolled sodalime. Click to enlarge.

Carbon dioxide scrubber canisters usually contain a chemical mixture called sodalime that chemically reacts with carbon dioxide in a diver’s expired breath. That material may be in granular form, or in a preformed roll. Sodalime is a mixture of calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide, which when it reacts by absorbing carbon dioxide is converted into calcium carbonate (CaCO_3,calcite), a major constituent of limestone.

The overall chemical reaction can be simplified to:

CO₂+ Ca(OH)₂ → CaCO₃ + H₂O + heat

In the following sequence of images we see a rectangular prism shaped scrubber canister arranged axially such that the diver’s expired breath enters the section from the left, passing completely through the canister section before exiting to the right. A portion of the canister was cut away digitally after the simulation was run to allow visualization of temperatures within the canister interior.

Beginning of the simulation. Click to enlarge.

Initially, the canister is at room temperature, and then is immersed in cold water as the diver begins his dive. Temperature is color coded: the coldest temperature is black, and increasing warmth is portrayed in an intuitive fashion from purple to red to yellow, and finally white, being the highest temperature.

In the first image, CO₂has just started reacting with the sodalime at the entrance to the canister section, with a slight heating resulting. Thermal conduction is cooling the exterior surface of the canister, but most of the inside still remains at room temperature.

In the second image, the reaction front has clearly formed, and the hottest portion of the canister has begun moving downstream. Convection carries heat rapidly downstream to heat the diver’s inspired breath, and is seen to offset canister cooling due to conduction from the surrounding cold water.

In the image to the left, the heating front is fully developed, and residual heat has spread almost completely throughout the downstream portion of the canister.

In the next image, to the right, the front is beginning to weaken in intensity.

Finally (lower left figure), the thermal heating in the reaction front, indicative of CO₂absorption effectiveness, is fading out, and the cooling of the canister from the surrounding cold water is beginning to win the tug of war between heat generation and conductive cooling.

At that point in time, the canister is spent, and essentially all of the exhaled CO₂is passing right through the canister without being absorbed. If the diver had not ended his dive before his canister reached this point, he would be at great risk of passing out due to CO₂accumulation.

The last figure (lower right) shows temperature readings at various locations, and at various times (reps) throughout the simulation run. The orange and brown traces marked “temp” are measured temperatures from locations near the entrance to the canister. They rise abruptly as the absorption reactions start, and fall quickly as the reaction front moves past them, downstream.

The curves that remain elevated longer represent the average exhaled gas temperature, and the average temperature within the absorbent bed. After reaching a peak, the average bed temperature steadily drops as cold gas from the inlet (exhaled) gas chills the portion of the bed behind the reaction front. Exhaled gas temperature, on the other hand, climbs more slowly, but remains more stable until the bed becomes depleted of absorbent activity.

The monitoring of absorbent canister temperature changes is what makes the rebreather scrubber canister monitors used in the Inspiration and Sentinel rebreathers possible. The Sentinel technology is licensed from the U.S. Navy Experimental Diving Unit.

In the next posting, we’ll see the surprising way that cold canisters fill up with calcium carbonate.

The following is a high definition video of the computer simulation of heat generation and loss in a short cylindrical canister. For best effect go to full screen and 1080p mode.

Diving Accident Investigation

Diving helmets waiting for accident investigations. Click for a larger image.

Compared to aircraft accident investigations, diving accident investigations are often ad hoc in nature, poorly conceived and poorly funded. Nevertheless, these investigations are just as important for the safety of the diving public as are similar investigations for the flying public. Unfortunately, no national regulations presently address how investigations of diving accidents should be conducted: volunteer investigators have no legal status for extracting information about an accident, and they have no legally binding protection from litigation based on the conduct of their investigation or on its results. That is, no business case can be made for conducting diving accident investigations, in spite of the moral authority for conducting them.

With the conviction that this untenable situation must eventually change, this presentation will describe one approach to diving accident investigations with particular emphasis on rebreathers and will draw some comparisons to aviation accident investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Aircraft accident investigations

The "black box" containing data recorded just prior to, and during, a commercial aircraft accident.

Pilots know that if they are involved in a fatal crash, the NTSB will investigate the accident by examining in excruciating detail everything those pilots did for hours, perhaps even days or weeks, leading up to that accident. It will investigate how often they called flight service to check on the weather. The NTSB will go through those pilots’ personal logbooks to check on their currency and proficiency, and it will check Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records for a history of violations. NTSB investigators will also examine an aircraft’s logbooks to scrutinize its maintenance records. They will play back voice and radar data, and if a data recorder is available, they will analyze its contents.

Then they get personal. The NTSB and its FAA counterparts will talk to mechanics, surviving passengers, and friends to ask questions such as, “What were the aviators’ attitudes toward flying? Were they cavalier? Did they take unnecessary risks, or were they careful and methodical?”

Due to the detailed, scripted nature of NTSB procedures, the investigation may take up to a year to complete.

A few years ago a pilot’s engine failed and he was forced to make a water landing just off a beach. The ditching should have been survivable, but he lost consciousness on impact and sank with the airplane as it settled to the bottom in relatively shallow water. He drowned.

If he had been a diver, that would have been the end of the story. The public judgment would have been, “A diver drowned. He tried to breathe underwater; this is what happens.” But this victim happened to drown inside an airplane. So instead of the medical examiner simply saying that he drowned, the NTSB started its very thorough investigation procedures.

Fortunately, the pilot also had a surviving passenger. From the survivor’s statement, the aircraft’s maintenance records, and the mechanic’s testimony, an ugly story of reckless disregard for the most basic safety rules of flying began to emerge.

Do divers ever show a reckless disregard for basic safety rules? You bet. It’s unfortunate that the pilot died, but the events leading to his death were a useful reminder that the media in which we work and play, high-altitude air and water, are not forgiving. Humans are not designed for flying or diving, and nature only begrudgingly lets us trespass — on its terms.

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard are chartered to investigate diving accidents. Unfortunately, there is a huge discrepancy in the number of personnel and the amount of funding for aviation accident investigations compared to diving accident investigations. The NTSB has hundreds of personnel and tens of millions in funding available, whereas the entire U.S. Navy has at most a handful of investigators with no investigation-specific funding.

Investigation team requirements

In the best of all worlds, an investigation team should have access to both a manned and an unmanned test facility, access to experts in all diving equipment (scuba, rebreathers, helmets), and the ability to conduct and interpret gas analyses — sometimes from minuscule amounts of remaining gas. At a minimum, such a team needs the ability to download and interpret dive computer/recorder data. Some investigations may require the simulation of UBA-human interactions for “re-enactment” purposes. An investigation team should also have diving medical expertise available to review medical examiner reports for consistency with known or discovered facts regarding the accident. Last, it should have in-depth knowledge of police investigative procedures, particularly of the procedures and documentation for maintaining “chain of custody”.

Do rebreather investigations have a future?

Considering the resources and time-frames required for laboratories such as the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) to conduct diving equipment evaluations on a limited set of accident cases, and the unfunded costs associated with those investigations, it is difficult to imagine a resolution to an ever-increasing need for rebreather investigations. Almost certainly, no independent federal agency similar to the NTSB will ever be responsible for investigating diving accidents, simply because diving accidents lack national attention: the public at large is not being placed in jeopardy.

It is also unlikely that diving equipment manufacturers would welcome federal agency oversight and regulations comparable to those engendered by the FAA and NTSB. Diving might become exorbitantly expensive. For instance, if a $5 part available for purchase in an automotive store were to be used in an aircraft, it would become a $50–$500 part because of FAA required documentation that it meets airworthiness standards.

The U.S. Coast Guard initiates diving accident investigations and in some cases conducts hearings into those accidents; however, with its enhanced role in Homeland Security, the Coast Guard is unlikely to welcome any efforts to diversify its mission. The cost/benefit ratio would appear to be too great.

For the future, as Dick Vann of DAN has suggested, the resolution may ultimately depend on rebreather users funding a team of dedicated, professional accident investigators. The cost of conducting worthwhile investigations has yet to be determined, and therefore the amount of funding needed to support it is unknown. I suggest that obtaining those estimates should be a priority as we, rebreather users and the industry, decide the next steps in investigating rebreather accidents.

The above are highlights from this author’s publication of the same name, found in: Vann RD, Mitchell SJ, Denoble PJ, Anthony TG, eds. Technical Diving Conference, Proceedings. Durham, NC: Divers Alert Network; 2009; 394 pages. ISBN# 978-1-930536-53-1.

This book is available for download at no cost as a PDF file from the Divers Alert Network website (http://www.DiversAlertNetwork.org/) or from http://archive.rubicon-foundation.org/8300

Divers In Space

Signs of flowing water have been found on Mars. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/science/space/05mars.html?_r=1

That of course makes Mars even more tantalizing than it is already.

Now Mars has been added to a growing list of bodies in our solar system that are believed to have water, and in some cases entire oceans. Let me be so bold as to pronounce, where you have water, you will eventually need divers.

I once attended a joint NASA – Diving Conference at Disney World in Orlando. It was largely devoted to discussions of the science and engineering that would be required to send men and women to Mars and to sustain them in a colony. I was presenting a diving related talk at the invitation of one of the editors of the Life Support & Biosphere Science journal, a short-lived scientific journal that reported on the science conducted in Biospheres and other life-support systems.

After hearing a number of fascinating NASA accounts, I talked about a rather arcane subject: A Priori models in the testing of diving life support equipment. That work was published in 1996. At the end of the talk, a NASA engineer asked, somewhat smugly I felt, how diving had anything to do with space.

Well, that wasn’t at all the purpose of the meeting, or the reason why I was talking. The organizers believed, correctly, that sojurns in space and underwater share elements in common; namely, people and breathing equipment. We could, and should, learn from each other.

Now, regarding the question: I can ad lib with the best of them. Knowing that Jupiter’s moon Europa was believed to be hiding a large ocean beneath its icy surface, I responded that someday astronauts will be carrying a dreadfully expensive piece of hardware to an alien moon or planet with water, and that priceless tool will get dropped — into the water. It happens all the time on Earth.

Now what? You can’t go on-line, order a replacement, and expect an overnight FedEx shipment. That is when a space diver would be worth his Earth-weight in rhodium.

enceladus-large — Saturn's moon Enceladus

Since that time, we’ve learned that Saturn’s moon Enceladus jets water from its south pole. As reported in the journal Icarus, that suggests that, like Europa, there may be a liquid ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust.

My suspicion is that long before we’ll need cowboys in space, we’ll need divers in space.

So divers, keep your diving helmets oxygen clean. You may get the call any day now.

How to Teach Ice Diving When the Arctic Is Melting

In 2007 Michael Lang of the Smithsonian Institution’s Scientific Diving Program sponsored a spring-time ice diving course in the high Arctic at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, in an area generally called Spitzbergen.

Ny-Ålesund, an international Arctic research town situated at 78°56’N, 11°56’E, is the most northern continuously operated community. It sits on the shore of a fjord called Kongsfjorden. In the springtime, the sea ice on the Kongsfjorden is usually several feet thick, providing an inviting platform for ice-diving operations.

DSCN1501 — North Pole Hotel, Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard

However, during the last decade the sea ice has been becoming thinner and sparser. By the time we arrived, there was virtually no ice on the fjord. The closest ice source was a glacier over two miles away. With no ice, polar bears could not capture their ringed seal prey, and were thus hungry, leading undoubtedly to the polar bear encounter described in an earlier posting (April 12).

It also left the course instructors, and I was once of them, in a quandary. It was expensive transporting diving scientists to the high Arctic to learn ice diving operations, and there was no ice to be seen. It appeared to us that the Arctic really was melting, surprisingly early in this case.

Although we had a few frigid days during our week-long stay, frigid enough to remind us we were close to the North Pole, one memorable day was almost balmy, reaching 0° C (32° F). Looking out over the fjord I saw mini-icebergs, recently calved by the rapidly melting glacier a few miles away.

Mini-icebergs, born on an unusually warm day

The word went out to launch all divers.

Dry land and underwater cameras, and high-definition video were working overtime to record the encounters between divers and ice. The result was some striking photos of delicately scalloped floating ice, with divers getting into the frames — just to prove they were indeed “ice-divers.” Unfortunately, that was not the type of experience that had been planned for those scientists.

As you might imagine, the water in the fjord was still bitterly cold, so the part of the course designed to teach about human and equipment survival in cold water was fully accomplished.

However, due to the growing sparseness and unreliability of the Arctic sea ice cover, the Smithsonian Diving Program has now moved its training and testing operations to McMurdo Station, Antarctica (see April 11 and May 26th posting). There, at least for the time being, lies plenty of thick sea ice covering the Ross Sea during the austral springtime.

I had not been impressed by the global warming rhetoric before I traveled to the Arctic. However, having seen the consequences first hand, at least in the far North, I get the strong impression that there are undeniable local climate changes occurring. Whether it is a truly global change, and whether man is somehow responsible, is an area of speculation that I will not venture into.

Only time will tell.

Why Deep Saturation Diving Is Like Going to the Moon, and Beyond

This week, as the Space Shuttle is making its last circuits around our planet, I lament what has happened to our space program. Yet, I am reminded of another exploration program that has, like the shuttle and the moon programs, reached incredible milestones only to retreat to a less exotic but still impressive status. That other program is experimental, deep saturation diving.

I have been privileged to conduct human physiological research on several deep saturation dives, one being a record-breaking U.S. Navy dive at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) in 1977 to a pressure equivalent to that found at 1500 feet sea water (fsw), or 460 msw*, and on a 450 msw (1470 fsw) dive at the GUSI diving facility at the GKSS Institute in Geesthacht, Germany in 1990. For perspective, the safe SCUBA diving depth is considered to be 130 fsw, although technical and cave divers often descend deeper, to 300 fsw or so.

Dives in hyperbaric chambers like at GUSI and NEDU are simulated; the divers don’t actually go anywhere. But the effects of the high pressure on the divers’ bodies are just as they would be in the ocean. Of course, even in simulated dives, divers wear Underwater Breathing Apparatus, and descend into water contained within the hyperbaric complex.

In 1979, NEDU again set the U.S. Navy record for deep diving to 1800 fsw (551 msw). At Duke University in 1981, the U.S. record for pressure exposure was set by three saturation divers inside an eight-foot diameter sphere. The internal pressure was 2250 fsw (686 msw). One of those divers went on to become the senior medical officer at NEDU, none the worse for his high pressure exposure.

The French company Comex, of Marseille used an experimental gas mixture of hydrogen-helium-oxygen to reach 675 msw, before being forced back to 650 msw due to physical and physiological problems with the divers. However, like teams attempting the summit of Mount Everest, one diver from the dive team was pressed to a world record of 701 msw (2290 fsw), just squeaking past the U.S. record.

There is a poorly understood physiological barrier called the High Pressure Nervous Syndrome (HPNS) that limits our penetration to ever deeper depths. In spite of the use of increasingly exotic gas mixtures, helium-oxygen in the U.S. Navy, helium-nitrogen-oxygen at Duke University, and hydrogen-helium-oxygen at Comex, all attempts to dive deeper have, to date, been rebuffed.

Just as I had thought as a young man that trips to the moon would be common-place by now, I had also assumed diving to 3000 feet would be routine. But it is not.

In my early research days I was interested in the effects on organisms of very high pressure, 5000 psi, which is equivalent to a depth of over 11,000 feet (3430 meters). We now know those effects can be profound, altering the very structure of cell membranes. Reversing those effects while maintaining high pressure, at great depth, is a daunting scientific task. We don’t yet know how to do it.

What we do know is that reaching 1500 feet can be done without too much difficulty. In the 1980s it became almost routine to dive to 1000 feet at both the Naval Medical Research Institute (Bethesda) and NEDU. Deep saturation diving is a thriving business in the oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

Click for a larger image.

But as for the similarity between deep saturation diving and NASA’s moon missions, in the Apollo program it took slightly over three days to get to the moon, and almost an equal time to return. But as the above dive profile shows, it took sixteen days to reach the maximum depth of 1500 fsw, and seventeen days to safely return. Over that period of time astronauts would have whizzed past the moon and been well on their way to Mars. Unlike spacecraft and astronauts, divers must slow their descent to avoid HPNS, and must slow their return to the surface to avoid debilitating and painful decompression sickness. Diving without submarines or armored suits is very much a demanding, physical stress.

Politically, exceeding our current depth limits of approximately 2000 feet is akin to returning to the moon, and going beyond. We could do it, but at what cost? Should we? Will it ever be a national priority?

Maybe not for the United States, but I have a suspicion that other countries, perhaps not as heavily committed to space as we, will find the allure of beating current diving records irresistible. If there are medical or pharmacological interventions developed for getting divers safely and productively down to 3000 feet, then that would be a scientific achievement comparable to sending men to Mars.

*[The feet to meters conversion is slightly different from the feet of sea water to meters of sea water conversion. The latter represents pressure, not depth, and therefore includes a correction factor for the density of sea water.]

Outsmarted by an Octopus

Jim Duran and I started a night dive in about sixty to seventy feet of water several miles off the beaches of Panama City, FL. I was wearing double 80 tanks, held a collecting bag and lights, and fully intended to capture an octopus, alive.

At the time I was working in an invertebrate physiology laboratory at Florida State University, under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Greenberg. I had been impressed by the reputed high intelligence of the octopus and was also interested in the effects of high pressure. The Navy base at Panama City had a new high pressure chamber, capable of simulating deep-sea pressures. Since I was in training in the combined Navy and NOAA program called the Scientist in the Sea, it seemed logical to me to catch an octopus and study it to see if it would be a suitable candidate for testing in the Navy’s giant hyperbaric chamber.

Navy Experimental Dive Unit, Panama City, Florida

It sounded like a reasonable plan to me, and Jim Duran was willing to follow along as my assistant critter catcher. And to begin with, the plan worked. We spied our quarry only a few minutes into the dive. The gray-brown octopus was crawling over the sandy bottom and initially seemed unaware of our intentions. But as the two of us closed in on him, specimen bag flapping in our self-generated current, he sprang off the bottom and squirted away.

But we were strong swimmers, and our quarry was in the open, maybe eight feet off the bottom. He had nowhere to hide – silly thing. Keeping our lights on him, and stroking like mad, I began gaining on him, at which time he let loose with his ink. I was prepared for that, and continuing to kick I soon caught up with him and got my hands on him, trying to stuff him into my bag. But he would have none of that.

Off we went again. What we didn’t realize was that the clever invertebrate was constantly turning to our right. We of course were too intent on capturing him to notice his strategy. And besides, invertebrates were incapable of strategic planning – or so we thought.

Apparently, the octopus was determined not to be touched again, or else we were tiring, for we never quite caught up with him. So close, and yet so far away.

And then a curious thing happened. He collapsed his tentacles upon themselves, streamlining his body shape, and shot like a rocket from our depth to the sandy bottom. Once on firm ground again, he spread his tentacles as wide as he could, and his entire body turned white. I froze in shock.

In another instant, before I could recover my senses, he collapsed his body down to the width of an apple and slithered into his hole in the sea floor.

He was gone.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that the chase had started near his home, and he had led us at a furious pace in a large circle, which ended precisely where it had begun. He had maneuvered us to within striking distance of safety.

Humbled, and now growing low on air, and embarrassingly empty-handed, we headed back to the off-shore platform where our dive had begun.

It had seemed like such a good idea. Who knew that two graduate students would be outsmarted by an invertebrate.

Below is a link to a video showing an octopus’ ability to disguise itself, and some of the defensive behavior we witnessed.

Purple octopus photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash