The Frozen Beaufort Sea: Part 2

This is the second part of our Beaufort Sea diving expedition story. Exhausted from the previous days travel it’s hard to pull myself out of bed. We use the community bathroom down the hall witch at this point doesn’t sound very appealing. We have to make sure we get to the cafeteria before they stop serving breakfast. Each one of us drags in at different times. Again the food is both plentiful and delicious.  I savored my first cup of coffee as I devoured my breakfast.

Once everyone was finished eating we discussed dive details. For most of us this was a “been there done that” event but for some of our team it was a completely new adventure. One of the only real hard and fast qualifications for this type of diving is the ability to remain calm while diving in an overhead environment.  This type of diving isn’t always easy

to come by and for many of our northwest dive team members what this meant was some type of wreck diving. The other forms of overhead environment diving common to the lower latitudes would be Cavern/Cave Diving and Ice Diving where available.

We finished our last cup of the black gold, climbed into the clumsy garb necessary to stay warm in this environment and headed over to the airport where our dive gear has been stored (outside) at 30 degrees below zero.  We are able to move it into a small airplane hanger where it’s warm. We unpack the equipment and insure it’s ready to take out to sea.

Diving under a polar Ice Cap can mean that for miles there is no other exit from below the ice than where you entered.  Most of the gear a diver wears this far north is not much different than the gear we normally wear in the Pacific Northwest.  I wear the same drysuit, the same tanks, Etc. The only real changes I make are the following. I “environmentally protect” my regulator which is to say that the regulator is protected from the open seawater by enclosing the areas where water usually floods in by covering them with an oil filled cap. This prevents the seawater from freezing inside the regulator and ceasing its functionality. I wear an “arctic grade” undergarment so it’s a little warmer than usual and we all wear full face masks so we don’t have to rely on frozen lips to seal a regulator in our mouths.

After insuring that all our gear is serviceable we repack it and stage it for the next day’s journey to the ice camp.Read part three of our Beaufort Sea adventure next.

OSHA Regulations on Scientific Diving

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA for short, is responsible for ensuring that employers provide a safe and healthy workplace. By setting certain rules and standards and supplying training and education, OSHA helps to guarantee that America’s workers are safe. It’s an important organization for all industries and the majority of American workers fall under OSHA’s far-reaching jurisdiction.

Originally, OSHA included all forms of diving under its safety umbrella. But scientific diving plays by it’s own rules. OSHA permits scientific diving to meet the standards of another organization - the American Academy of Underwater Sciences, or the AAUS. The AAUS established scientific diving guidelines long before OSHA and felt that OSHA’s attempt to regulate scientific diving was a step backwards.

The AAUS has set standards for all scientific diving operations and certifications. Their mission is to “facilitate the development of safe and productive scientific divers through education, research, advocacy, and the advancement of standards for scientific diving practices, certifications, and operations.” They set the standards that allow research diving to operate exempt from the OSHA’s commercial diving regulations.

At first, OSHA classified all diving together. This meant that recreational divers, commercial divers, and scientific divers all had to follow the same standards of practice. The three forms of diving are quite different and it was hard to regulate them all the same way. Commercial diving is like construction underwater and recreational diving is purely for enjoyment reasons. Scientific diving is different because it is done exclusively for research purposes. Any scientist that studies the ocean needs to have the necessary skills to be proficient underwater. They also are not going to be performing the underwater construction or labor-intensive practices of a commercial diver. For these reasons, scientific diving can be exempt from OSHA rules.

In order to meet the criteria to qualify as science diving and to be exempt from the OSHA regulations, the institution funding the scientific diving research must meet four criteria:

1. The Diving Control Board has absolute authority over all scientific diving operations.
2. The purpose must be for the advancement of science and be non-proprietary.
3. Scientific divers are only observers and data gatherers - not construction or troubleshooters.
4. Participants in science diving must be scientists or scientists-in-training.

Scientific diving is an interesting niche of the diving world. It is a unique part of diving and because of this it can play by its own regulations and rules.

For more information on scientific diving’s OSHA’s exemption, please visit osha.gov and read the “Guidelines for Scientific Diving.”