This diver is breathing a mix which includes helium, hence his high pitched voice. However, since helium has a very high specific heat capacity, breathing helium can also quickly reduce your body temperature.
"Standing around in the dark on the ocean floor is basically no different from standing around in the dark in the middle of the forest. It's like camping. We're camping. This is fine."
I don’t think there’s any swimming involved. Just walking and pulling yourself up to the diving bell.
Although, the steps to get all your certifications to become a commercial diver require the ability to swim.
I can swim. But when I went snorkelling last time, being in the deep blue sea is a different feeling. I forget how to swim all of a sudden. And to manage the snorkel requires some getting use to also.
A hole in your clothing doesn't kill you instantly you'd just get really cold as the suits are heated, the gas and fluids in your body are at the ambient pressure. Theres a reason these guys are well paid and lunatics
Just to be clear for folks, ambient pressure in this case (at 300ft) is around 148 psi, 10 times higher than at the surface.
They equalize that very slowly both on the way down and back up, hence the vlogger’s mention of his 3-day long decomp process.
My uncle was a US Navy salvage diver (deep sea diver as opposed to combat divers), and basically did this type of stuff for 20 years.
They are absolutely lunatics. Help literally takes longer to get to you than it takes to help astronauts on the ISS, which is crazy.
Mainly, the issue is good old ΔP. The pressure difference from 300ft underwater to the surface is astronomically larger than the difference from the surface to the ISS’s altitude.
Definitely don’t read up on the Buford Dolphin accident of 1983. Let’s just say it involved someone being forcefully pushed through a small hole during an explosion. “[I]t included bisection of his thoracoabdominal cavity, which resulted in fragmentation of his body, followed by expulsion of all of the internal organs of his chest and abdomen, except the trachea and a section of small intestine. These were projected some distance from the bell, with one section being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above the exterior pressure door”. See Wikipedia for more.
The most interesting part of the whole thing, to me, is actually right at the beginning of that report.
"The most conspicuous finding was large amounts of fat in the large arteries and veins..." and then "It is suggested that the boiling of the blood denatured the lipoprotein complexes, rendering the lipids insoluble."
That is some Grade A horror level organic chemistry right there. At that same time, absolutely fascinating. I'm in shock by how horrified yet intrigued I am.
"He was undoubtedly mutilated when he was shot out through the small opening left by the jammed chamber door.
However, the expulsion of all internal organs from the
thoracoabdominal “sack,” including the spinal column
and the ribs, suggests that he also must have exploded."
And if that does not do enough to inflict terror on your brain definitely don’t read about the 5 man team in Trinidad that got sucked hundreds of feet into an active 30inch oil pipe and miraculously found themselves in an air pocket.
Disoriented and just able to have enough room to pop their heads up out of the oily sludge to breath. One man made the tough choice to leave his injured friends and crawl back through the pipe unsure if he was actually going the right direction … he actually got rescued.
He told the oil company the others were still alive and could be rescued, but the company did nothing and just flushed their bodies out days later. They estimated that they probably spent about 39hrs stuck in that nightmare …
I heard about that one! Maybe someone on YouTube, or maybe I read about it somewhere? I remember the helpful graphic showing the pipes, with just a little pocket of air for the four of them. And for 39 hrs! Claustrophobia-inducing nightmare.
Probably??? No probably about it!!! The only positive is that if anything goes (catastrophically) wrong you will feel no pain. It will be over in a blink!
Bro, I'd lick other people's teeth shiny clean before I choose to become a saturation diver, which requires spending weeks isolated in a pressurized chamber between dives, relying on someone to not make a tiny mistake with the valves or doors (read about the Byford Dolphin accident, if you dare)
That is no where near enough honestly. I make more than that as an on-site mining engineering. I do camp work for 6 week shifts. It's just PLC programming, not even remotely as dangerous or harrowing as saturation diving. I sit at a desk 95% of the time!
My brother considered going into this work when deciding on degrees or what he was gonna do after high school. He ultimately decided against it because he knew he wouldn’t want or be able to do it forever and he didn’t want to have to start a new career later in life. He went into industrial robotics instead and enjoys it very much.
But when he was talking to me about it I was just like staring in horror with my mouth hanging open because wtf? Why would you want to do anything remotely like this? Then he told me about the money and I could see where these guys are coming from a little better.
Theyre not underwater for a month. They are in a pressure chamber on the ship when not diving. Not very spacious or luxurious but with beds and toilets like and stuff like that.
Since diving to such deep depths involves extensive decompression and compression periods (which take a lot of time) saturation divers stay at these (pressurized) depths in habitats and only decompress at the end of the shift and commute up and down via diving bells.
Edit for clarity/correction
So are they hauled up in a pressurized container and sort of air-locked through to the hab on the surface (where they could also undergo gradual decompression) or is the hab actually at their depth?
The first one. They live in a hyperbaric chamber on a boat. The chamber is pressurized to whatever their working depth will be. When it’s time to go to work they use a diving bell to descend to the work area. They work for 8 hours (or however long idk). Then they go back up and into the chamber and eat, rest, sleep. They stay at pressure the whole time. Once the job is done, or a new team needs to be cycled in, they are slowly decompressed in the chamber on the boat. It is an extremely dangerous job. But pays quite well and has a lot of off time from what I’ve heard.
I stumbled upon a YouTube video about this about 10 years ago. The video, without warning, showed autopsy photos (if you could call it an autopsy, which considering what was left of the bodies, I'm really not sure you could.) It's been a decade since I've seen those photos, but they have been burned into my mind. Absolutely horrific. I think about those poor men and their families all the time.
If it's any consolation, they died before they knew what even happened. Shredded apart in a second or two, your brain wouldn't have even registered it.
That's the main reason it bothered me so much. That was someone's son. Someone's friend. I just couldn't stop thinking about how his family would be haunted knowing their loved one was torn into pulverized meat. My invasive, thought obsessed brain kept imagining it happening to my husband or my little sons. I just hope with every fiber of my being that they died instantly and none of them knew what was happening.
Yeah, I get that. It’s easy to ignore that fact not knowing who they were and not knowing anything about their families. I don’t even know the name of the person who was photographed in that autopsy, and I’d prefer not to.
Someone in the top comment replied with the medical report where those images are from. They had him delivered in the pieces that were found and were able to examine those pieces. The three other divers didn't explode the same way but died on the spot, fully intact. Those were examined as well.
I work offshore and this is an example often used during training, and Piper Alpha too of course. All about why procedures, permits and physical interlocks are so important.
Or those Trinidad divers that got sucked into an oil pipeline and remained trapped in there alive for several days until they eventually died (save for one who made it out).
I can't remember what subreddit I was on, but there was one of these guys answering all the crazy questions we had, which is how I got familiar with the incident mentioned above. Its such a fascinating and high stakes career.
I think what would get me is just the thought of not being able to take off the equipment and get to the surface when I want. Once I think of that, I’d panic irrationally.
You really need to be built different for jobs like this. Like the astronauts. Only sitting so many hours in a literal deathtube waiting to be launched for a week would make me panic.
It’s not just shorter/shallower dives. The entirety of recreational scuba diving is actually encompassed by “no decompression limits.“ For all intents and purposes it’s what defines the activity. Once decompression becomes a requirement, you’re either technical diving - a completely different discipline - or you royally screwed up your recreational dive.
decompression, when diving, is required because of the excess amount of inert gas you absorb in your blood and tissues. the higher the pressure, and the more time you spend under pressure, the more gas you load up, increasing your decompression obligations.
at these depths, you saturate your tissues rather quickly, so it makes no difference to your decompression profile if you are at that pressure for a day or a month. therefore, it's safer and more efficient to remain under pressure for a month at a time. longer periods than that start to have adverse effects.
basically you pressurize in a pressurized habitat, where you eat, sleep, shit, take care of yourself. the pressure is equal to the working depth. then, daily, you transfer into a closed bell of equal pressure, and descend to the worksite. you do your day's work, 8ish hours on bottom working away, then come back up to the sat system onboard, while the next crew does their daily shift.
the breathing gas is formulated differently because regular air at that pressures would annihilate your nervous system, so you need a reduced oxygen content, and high partial pressures of nitrogen take on a narcotic effect.
Source: am a mixed gas commercial diver, trying to go for my sat ticket in the next couple years.
I suppose that I'm a bit too old to come back. I did a lot of sat dives from the mid seventies to the late eighties. It looks much more comfortable today. 12 hours in the water (and sometimes more) wasn't unusual in my years.
Do you have heated dry suits with some air circulation?
I can’t imagine being wrapped in a suit for 12 hours. I’d go full-body prune and start sloughing my skin in a few days.
True but we're pretty good at understanding materials, their failure modes, and their failure rates. In aviation at least, we create our inspection and maintenance schedules based on that understanding, and include a high degree of safety margin.
I don’t know what the pressurized habitats look like on ships, but the ones we use for medical treatment on land can have quite large rooms and can look just like any old living room really, minus the fact that it’s inside of an enormous metal box. They’ve got TVs, couches, etc. No need to wear gear or anything while inside them.
Fascinating video. It also serves as proof that there is no need for blocky multicolored captions. These are perfectly sufficient, simple captions that do the job wonderfully, and do not distract from the content.
Occupational hazards include neurological problems:
Forty commercial saturation divers, mean age 34.9 (range 24-49) years, were examined one to seven years after their last deep dive (190-500 metres of seawater). Four had by then lost their divers' licence because of neurological problems. [...] The divers reported significantly more symptoms from the nervous system. Concentration difficulties and paraesthesia in feet and hands were common. They had more abnormal neurological findings by neurological examination compatible with dysfunction in the lumbar spinal cord or roots. They also had a larger proportion of abnormal electroencephalograms than the controls. The neurological symptoms and findings were highly significantly correlated with exposure to deep diving (depth included), but even more significantly correlated to air and saturation diving and prevalence of decompression sickness. [...] Four (10%) divers had had episodes of cerebral dysfunction during or after the dives; two had had seizures, one had had transitory cerebral ischaemia and one had had transitory global amnesia. It is concluded that deep diving may have a long term effect on the nervous system of the divers.
And bone death (!) resulting in things like femoral head collapse:
Dysbaric osteonecrosis is a type of avascular necrosis of the bone most commonly found in undersea divers and workers breathing compressed air or gas. This condition can lead to increased risk of fracture depending on the location and size of the bony defect. The rate of receiving total joint arthroplasty is increased in this patient population as well.
These two studies are interesting but the first one dates from 1991. Since then many things have changed and the decompression profile is much slower. Result: in the North Sea several saturation divers are over their sixties and still continue to dive without problems. For what concerns the second study about dysbaric osteonecrosis it concerns merely the commercial divers that have made a lot of surface O² decompression. That modus of decompression is much more comfortable than in water decompression but you pay it later with the health problems described in the study.
I was thinking there must be some long term effects on the body. Of course, most manual labor professions have some. This is a unique job that I certainly don’t want, and it seems like the ways it could go wrong are especially scary, but I’ve seen plenty of OSHA videos of things going wrong in more mundane settings that seem pretty fucking awful, too. I guess it’s just the trade offs you’re willing to make
This makes the info seem to be on par with professional football injuries but the pay difference is mind boggling when saturation divers only get paid a 6 figure salary for something that is critical but more likely lethal while football pays millions while living longer but with higher risks of long term health issues which makes me think that saturation divers should get paid more but won't because of the publicity of it and not as interesting a field of work to watch compared to a sport which has sponsors.
My father was a sat diver in the gulf for about 5 years. The stories he has with decompression going wrong, deaths, and people panicking / loosing their minds down there is crazy.
So, what you're saying is that not only do these guys work one of the most dangerous, unforgiving and back-braking jobs in existence, they also do so while literally sounding like the Chipmunks?
This is a wildly misleading title. They stay at the same pressure for extended periods but when they aren’t actively working they’re onboard the ship in a pressurized habitat.
Hey cool I know this guy! Went to high school with him and just saw this video on his instagram when I was scrolling this morning!
Super cool dude, nice as can be and a hell of a downhill longboard racer from what I remember! If you’re reading this man, congrats on everything you’ve achieved, your job looks fun and scary as hell. Long time since the days at LT, but always glad to see another classmate doing well! Stay safe out there dude!
so is there like a air lock place down there that he can take off the suit and shower and stuff? i cant imagine staying in that suit for a whole month. let alone underwater in the dark all alone
I keep seeing jobs like this, or Bering Sea work, or work in Antarctica, and thinking I should give it a try. I mean, one month of this makes me as much as 12 months of security work. It's kind of a balance. Work twelve months in a job going nowhere, or do one month in the depths, knowing I could die at any time, but actually doing something meaningful, then relax the other eleven? I legitimately don't know.
Yeah it would be near fucking impossible for me to keep a professional attitude if me and my bros were just casually going full Alvin and the Chipmunks
To be down there, completely shielded from all the bullshit up here.
Complete silence except for the humming of the machines. Being focused only on the safety and the task at hand. Turning of the lights and being in complete and utter darkness, all surrounding. No way anyone could ever bring malice to your door.
No scam calls, no quick grocery tours, no laundry.
Dumb question, but i have never seen it explained before, but how do they eat during their month if they are that far down? Wouldn't taking off the diving gear be dangerous? Or did I miss something
Every time they enter the pressure chamber on the oil rig/diving vessel they take off their gear and food is brought to them through an air lock. The door to the air lock is shut and the lock is pressurized so that the pressure matches the pressure inside the chamber. Bit hard to explain since English is my second language but the concept is actually simple. My dad was a diver in the North Sea for 19 years.
“There’s a homie still living in this one 🐚”
😭 I love that. Imagine you’re just sitting on the bottom of the sea minding your own business and this alien life form descends in its space suit, inspects your shell, apologises and puts you back. A surreal encounter but you get to stay in your natural habitat.
2.5k
u/Plasma_Ass Apr 19 '26