Posts Tagged ‘diving’

OSHA Regulations on Scientific Diving

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

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.”

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Underwater Diver Communications

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

In recreational diving people communicate through a variety of hand signals. Most of the time you can completely understand what the other person is trying to communicate. You may want to tell your diving buddy any number of things like “look at the shark,” “my ears are not good,” “okay,” or “low on air.” It is essential to learn the basic hand signals. They are a universal language that crosses language barriers and brings underwater explorers together.

In today’s technological world, advancements are being made in underwater communications. While it may not be necessary for simple recreational diving, it is a great step forward for scientific diving teams. The ocean is a vast place that needs to be explored and scientific divers may need to travel long distances underwater to follow a turtle or explore a coral reef.

New technology allows dive teams to keep track of each other underwater and to transmit their observations to other team members on the surface or underwater. Acoustical signals have been the most popular way to communicate underwater because they travel through the water better than radio waves. It’s like when you hear the high pitch of a dolphin when you are diving, but may never see it. The pitch travels well through the water. Scientific divers can carry devices that transmit tones and each tone means something different. It is a good system, but not a perfect system of communication and many variables can affect the message over long distances.

Technology is always advancing. And it is quickly moving away from the classic acoustical signals. A company called Divelink is using cell phone signals for underwater communication. By wearing a full-face mask divers can speak to other members of the team just as they would on the surface. The technology eliminates bulky extra equipment by incorporating the technology in the full facemask. The divers can speak with surface personnel, dive partners, and even people back on the mainland. It has an underwater range of 2000 meters and is completely hands free.

This new technology is positively changing the way divers communicate. It allows dive teams to work together to make observations and share information underwater – a luxury that once had to wait until the divers surfaced. This ability is helping scientists gather data more quickly and efficiently.

Effective underwater communications truly makes science diving easier. Being able to discuss and point out your observations as you see them underwater is helpful to the scientific process and makes for trouble-free collaboration between scientific divers and surface crews.

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Dive Teams

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

One of the big rules of diving is to never dive alone. A diving buddy can save your life if you have any sort of problems underwater. Being able to rely on your buddy is extremely important. Scientific divers take the buddy system to a new level and utilize dive teams.

Dive teams for scientific diving includes not only the divers underwater but also any dive operation support personnel. Every dive team member works together to help with the scientific pursuit of the operation. They all need to be competent divers that are able to promote a safe and healthy dive operation. It is important that all team members have an understanding of the dive operation and scientific research goals. As part of the team they need to work together to understand all aspects of the project and be able to step up and fill another team members role.

Every member plays an important role in the success of the project. There is usually a dive supervisor or a dive leader that takes charge of the operation. Two divers act as underwater buddies for each other. Support crew stays on the surface to help in case of emergency, to monitor divers, and to help record any data.

The dive team works together for the entire dive – starting at the early stages of planning a dive, site orientation, and research goal objectives. This makes certain that all dive team members are on the same page. During the dive, every team member knows what is happening and is able to support his or her teammates in any way necessary.

Dive teams vary in size. In perfect conditions with minimal tide, clear waters, and shallow depths, a team may only consist of a dive supervisor and two divers. However if the research is taking place in dark waters or Polar Regions, dive teams need more people in case of emergency. If the dive is especially deep, stand-by divers may position themselves at different safety and decompression stops to make sure that the divers are doing okay.

The key to dive teams, as it is with any type of team, is that everyone works together to accomplish the goal. Understanding the diving operation, being ready for the unexpected, and having the ability to fill any teammate’s role sets a scientific diving team up for success.

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Quality Monitoring Methods

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Researching anything involves plenty of data samples and observations. In order to understand how things function, it’s important to see how they work and the conditions that affect them over an extended period of time. Just like a doctor takes a patient’s vital signs regularly, scientists must record observations and data frequently. This is the only way to get an accurate view of the overall picture.

The details are what makes or breaks a science experiment. But getting all the details can be a time consuming and challenging process. This is especially true in scientific diving. In order to monitor the changing conditions of the ocean over the long term, scientific dive teams need to log lots of bottom time.

Monitoring can take place in many different situations. Scientific divers may need superb buoyancy control to monitor the interactions of a certain symbiotic relationship between a coral and a fish or they may need to monitor the entire reef to see the long-term results of pollution or of natural fluctuations caused by climate change. Monitoring can tell us about an organism’s lifestyles and habits. By learning this information over the long-term scientists can help define and prioritize where research and funding is needed.

Long term monitoring may not only involve regular observations of ocean life, but it may also include taking water temperatures at different depths, recording what nutrients are in the water, noting the changing sea level depths, detailing the thickness of ice, logging the feeding activity of a certain species, measuring water contents, or any number of other things important to scientific research.

The key to quality monitoring is to take accurate notes and record all observations on a regular basis. The information that is obtained from monitoring is critical to understanding the overall long-term underwater world. Monitoring can be tedious work, but the details can fill gaps in our marine knowledge that are important to science and to future discoveries. Proper monitoring can lead to new understandings on things like climate change, coral reef preservation, the habits of sea turtles, or any number of other underwater happenings.

Monitoring plays an important role in the scientific process. It can be a fun process to observe and to note what you find underwater. Your records could reveal things that have never been seen or understood before.

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