The Frozen Beaufort Sea: Part 3

Training for diving in the arctic focuses on emergency preparedness. Here failures can come in many forms.

This entry will focus on frozen regulators or running out of air.

Frozen Regulators issues usually come in two forms.

1. A regulator frozen open and free flowing. With no direct route to the surface (and air) this can spell disaster if you don’t know how to handle this emergency.

2. A frozen closed regulator which gives you no air. Again with no direct route to the surface (and air) this can spell disaster if you don’t know how to handle this emergency.  There are other reasons a diver may not have sufficient air and the emergency procedures for dealing with these are the same as with a frozen regulator.

Arctic divers utilizing full face masks usually have two backup methods of solving this issue unassisted. The first is a redundant air source that is controlled through a Manifold or gas switching Block. Both the primary and secondary air supplies are connected to this block and from this block run one hose to the mask itself. In the event of a first stage failure this device is simply switched over and air will flow from the redundant air tank to the mask.

If the issue resides in the regulator or mask itself then the procedure to deal with it becomes more difficult. This is when we implement a procedure commonly referred to as a “Bail Out. ” A Bail out is where a diver must remove their full face mask underwater and replace it with what is customarily called an “octopus” regulator and a more conventional scuba mask. An “octopus regulator” is simply a conventional regulator that is held in reserve in case of emergency.

The difficulties in performing this maneuver can be many. First, by the time a diver recognizes that they need to perform this maneuver they have already been without air for the period of time in which it took to try the manifold switching maneuver. Air is now becoming very necessary. Second, the water is below freezing in temperature and a diver’s face is several degrees above. When the mask is removed Ice cold water floods the mask. Water often bubbles up inside the nostrils making it hard to breathe after you get the octopus regulator in your mouth.

3. With your face beginning to freeze, your eyes (most likely) closed and in crucial need of air you have to find and deploy the octopus.

4. Seal your now freezing lips to the regulator and breathe. You will most likely take several breaths before taking the time to find your mask. Putting it on your face and clearing it so you can once again see.

If this all comes together successfully it is now time to end the dive and exit the water. If not then you may have to rely on your buddy to supply you with the necessary air and support to get you out of the water in time.

Keep in mind the other issues that may be facing you.

1. The distance between you and the ice hole.
2. Your buoyancy while performing this entire procedure.
3. Decompression or necessary safety stops.
4. Amount of air in the redundant tank.
5. Personal stress related both air consumption as well as every other issue.

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.

Diving Expedition Evacuation Plans

It doesn’t take long to learn that in the world of diving, expeditions aren’t all created equal. I had the good fortune to be included on some big budget and rather extravagant expeditions early in my career that set the benchmark for many trips to come.

While I have both participated in and organized expeditions of all sizes I became dedicated early on to the premise that the smaller expeditions need to employ the same disciplines embodied in the larger events. In many ways it’s more important to take those disciplines much more seriously.

For example, it’s not unusual for larger expeditions to have evacuation plans generated and filed in case of emergency. Every contingency needs to be taken into account. This is especially true when the trip is operated in remote locations. Large expeditions often have many resources available to them that can smooth out the wrinkles in what may be a less than thorough evacuation plan or they may simply have enough equipment or supplies at their immediate control to handle emergencies that might otherwise become tragic events.

Smaller trips need to insure that evacuation plans are thorough, concise, and able to be implemented at the earliest possible moment. Keep in mind that if you are on a trip with limited personnel the need for everyone to be made aware of their responsibility in regard to the details of the evacuation plan is of the highest priority.

Evacuation may be necessary for many reasons. Diving maladies are only one of them Keep in mind that there are many possible dangers that can be encountered. Know your dive team and know the area you will be working in both undersea and above water.

Arctic Dive Expeditions

Every year for the past 6 years Scientific Diving’s founder has ventured to the Arctic with University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. The trips lasted typically 6-8 weeks and the project were varied…

More on these expeditions later.

Diving Rebreathers and their Applications

In traditional open circuit SCUBA, you exhale bubbles. Those bubbles contain extra carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and non-used oxygen. A closed circuit rebreather eliminates the bubbles of used gases and recycles the unused gas back into the system. It then adds oxygen from a separate tank to replace any oxygen your body used. The goal is help you reduce and refresh the amount of air you need through recycling.

Rebreathers have many advantages over typical open circuit SCUBA set-ups. The biggest advantage is that no gas is wasted. Typically, a diver uses about 75% of the oxygen in a breathe of air and wastes 25%. The rebreather reuses that wasted 25%, which makes your air tank more efficient. In addition, when a diver is using air mixes that use expensive gases like helium, the recycling of the gases makes diving more cost efficient.

Because of the “closed” circuit, rebreathers do not create bubbles, so they are less noisy. This a real advantage for scientific divers because they do not disturb marine life when they approach and can get much closer to creatures without alarming them. Air from rebreathers is also are easier to breath because the gases are warm. Plus, rebreathers can adjust the ratio of gases in the tank to reduce the time of lengthy decompression stops.

Rebreathers have been shown to actually be safer on deeper dives over 75 meters or in overhead dive spots like caves or wrecks or ice because you use your air more efficiently. These are situations that scientific divers often find themselves in.

While rebreathers have plenty of advantages, they are also risky. Hypoxia and oxygen toxicity are common even with the most competent divers. Divers need to take rebreather training and stay current on the latest technology if they want to utilize the benefits of rebreathers in their diving.

Rebreathers are a fantastic option for scientific divers. They allow divers to approach marine life and observe the fine details of habitats, plants, and creatures without causing stress to the organism. They are safer in situations such as polar ice diving, cave diving, or deep diving because the amount of air you carry will last you longer with a rebreather than with a standard open circuit SCUBA system. Rebreathers efficiently recycle the gases to allow more available air for divers. With the proper training, they can bring scientific diving to a new level.

Diving Gases

Diving is thrilling. It gives you the feeling of exploring the unexplored and going where no one else has ever ventured. The deep blue sea is alluring. Only about 1% of the deep parts of the ocean have been explored, so it’s natural to be curious about what lurks in the blue abyss that drops out below you. It’s a world that once you are in it; you often don’t want to leave.

Most divers dive with air, which is a mix of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1%, other gases. It allows you to safely venture to 132 feet or 40 meters below the ocean surface. This is where the majority of sea life lives and is plenty deep for any recreational diver. If you dive any deeper you are at more risk for nitrogen narcosis and decompression sickness, not to mention that you use your air much quicker. It’s just dangerous.

Science divers often need to go deeper or stay longer. It may be that they are researching algae that only live hundreds of feet below the surface or they are observing an electric eel feeding. When this happens they need to use a different air mix. This means that they are changing the normal mixture of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other gases to allow them to dive deeper or stay longer. There are two main air mixes that allow divers to do this. They are Nitrox and Trimix.

Nitrox is a common air mix. Recreational divers can become certified nitrox, or enriched air, divers. Nitrox increases the amount of oxygen in the mix. It usually boosts the oxygen percentage to 32 or 36 percent. Nitrox increases the amount of time a diver can stay underwater without risk of decompression sickness, but does not necessarily increase how deep they can go. Nitrox increases your risk of oxygen toxicity if you go too deep, but decreases your risk of decompression sickness. It also reduces fatigue. These are all benefits for science divers that are doing repetitive dives in relatively shallow waters and want to maximize bottom time.

Trimix is the most common type of air mix if you want to dive deeper. Instead of only mixing oxygen and nitrogen, it also adds a third gas - helium. The addition of helium to the mix decreases the amounts of the other gases and allows divers to decend up to 100 meters. Using trimix also means more training and more responsibility.  You need to have an intricate understanding of diving physics, be prepared to follow exact instructions for filling air mixes, and be able to carry extra trimix tanks and travel air to allow for safety stops and safe travel through shallower waters.

Air mixes add a whole new element to diving. They open up new doors and allow for longer and/or deeper diving. With proper training and procedures, air mixes truly benefit the scientific diving world.

American Academy of Underwater Science

The American Academy of Underwater Science (AAUS) is an organization formed in 1977 in California to oversee scientific diving. They are the leading organization that sets the guidelines and standards for all scientific diving programs. 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.”

Institutes, individuals, organizations, and universities that do any from of scientific diving become members of AAUS. The AAUS works with Organizational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as the governing official of scientific diving. They set all the guidelines and standards that are necessary to ensure that scientific diving is safe and healthy.

When groups like NOAA or Stanford University want to send a group of scientists or scientists-in-training underwater for research purposes, they must meet the AAUS rules to be exempt from OSHA regulations. This means that the diving control board is the absolute authority over their operation, that the project is used only for the advancement of science and is nonproprietary, that the scientists can only be observers and data gathers, and that the only people allowed to work on the operation are scientists and scientists in training.

The AAUS ensures that all member groups meet these exemption regulations. In return the AAUS helps protect the groups from fines and civil suits. The scientific diving community also relies on the AAUS’s publications that come out monthly and on a yearly symposium to spread the word about scientific diving. The AAUS publishes scientific papers about the research being done by different scientific diving teams around the world. They also alert scientific divers about equipment recalls, funding and scholarships, calls for proposals, upcoming scientific diving events, job opportunities, and new publications.

Possibly the most important aspect of the AAUS is that of reciprocity between organization members. This allows research groups to share information about their projects. This collaboration allows science to take greater steps forward more quickly.

The AAUS is the organization for scientific diving. It is the group that brings all scientists and scientific diving teams together to promote the knowledge of the underwater world.

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.”

Cold Water Diving Equipment

Not all diving takes place in perfect tropical warm waters. In fact, the majority of the world’s waters are cold, hostile environments, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t dive there. Cold water diving is an adventure. It makes you more alert, attentive, and aware of your equipment and environment. When you jump into a cold water environment for the first time you will get a rush of adrenaline and you may become hooked on diving in uncrowded, cold waters.

Cold water diving adds many new elements to the art of diving. First you’ll need more gear. Besides the usual BCD, mask, fins, snorkel, regulator, gauges, octopus, compass, computer, and cylinder you will usually need a dry suit, gloves, and a full hood to keep the water from sucking away your body heat. Staying warm underwater is harder than it sounds. Some people rely on thick wetsuits for warmth. A dry suit is another viable option that serves to keep you dry, not warm. It allows you to wear insulating layers against your skin to stay warm. Thermal insulation is key to enjoying yourself in coldwater conditions before, during and after your dive.

You also need to realize that when your body is cold, you make up for being cold by breathing faster. This means your tank of air that usually lasts you 45 minutes in warm water, may only last 20 minutes in cold water. You’ll need to account for this when you plan your dives.

Depending on the temperature of the water you’re diving in you also need to be aware that cold can affect your equipment. Cold sucks the life out of batteries for strobes, lights, and communication equipment. It can freeze your regulator hoses and a free-flow makes them more susceptible to freezing.

Emergencies are much more likely in cold water conditions. If you’re not warm, you’ll breath faster, the cold may affect your equipment and it could be a recipe for disaster. When you dive in cold water you need to take extra precautions and have extra training. Coldwater diving training is easy to find in any coldwater locale. From the Arctic Ocean, the coast of Alaska, or the English Channel - cold water diving is well worth the risks if you’re ready for the adventure of a lifetime.

Polar Region Diving

Polar diving brings all sorts of fun and excitement to the world of diving. The polar regions of our world have extreme conditions that are challenging in ways that other diving areas are not. It’s a breathtaking diving realm and is a thrilling place to pursue science diving. Every dive is different in the unpredictable waters of the poles and diving there demands an extremely high diving skill level.

Waters in the polar region hover around 29 degrees Fahrenheit all year long. That is frigid. Cold water can cause a diver to breathe faster, use more energy, and get tired quickly. It also makes basic tasks harder to perform - tasks that may be critical to your research, data gathering, and observations. This is a major problem when you need your fingers to function to check your diving computers or turn on your air. Small tasks can prove to be exceedingly difficult in cold weather, especially underwater where the cold can cause irrational thinking.

The polar regions offer scientists the opportunity to dive beneath the ice. Similar to cave or wreck diving, polar diving requires divers to dive with no direct route to the surface. In order to enter the water, the dive team must dig a hole through the ice with a big drill. It can be disorienting and often cause panic because it can be dark and it can be impossible to push or dig through an inch or more of ice to regain the surface. Polar diving demands practice, an extremely high level of skill, and confidence in your skills.

Problems often arise in polar situations that wouldn’t happen in tropical waters. Regulators tend to free flow or freeze up, air is consumed faster, decisions are hard to make, rescue is harder, and extra precautions must always be taken. Cold can cause increased risk of decompression sickness or hypothermia. Divers must wear proper equipment like dry suits and full-face masks to attempt to stay warm.

Polar diving can be an amazing experience if you are prepared for the environment and competent with your diving skills. Diving under the ice is a spectacular experience. Clear waters and incredible colors come alive. Unique creatures like seals, penguins, and krill are prime subjects to study. Research on ice is becoming more important with the onset of global warming. The polar regions offer large quantities of research for qualified scientific divers that are up to the challenge.

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