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Expedition style Cave Exploration, is it the next wave-? A thought into the next decade-! Think of the possibilities: Beyond Wakulla........two or three weeks underground, underwater.....deep inside an un-explored cave with no worries of having to deco on a daily basis-! Of having an un-limited supply of gas. Is this in our future-?
Beyond Wakulla? Thats hard to imagine. I have the book on the Wakulla springs project, what they did was really incredible. Technology is only getting better, We could very well go much further than that.
What about exploring that huge sink in Mexico? Seck said that even from 900 somthin' feet it was still going off into the abyss.
Nuno Gomes just hit 1044 feet in the Red Sea, a team of divers in a exotic gas, saturated environment could go way beond deeper than that.
The bottom of the Mexican Cenoate is having depthX developed to search the area in an independent format. Similar development to UAE’s and recent machinery to find and locate mines in littoral waters recently, deployed in Iraq.
Also being developed in the community is Lidar and other materials to map the area. There are above and below the water mapping models being worked on.
The present issues with scrubbers are duration, proper fluid dynamics and bailout. I was having a conversation with a person and he advised that he was having divers regularly diving to 500ft on his unit but that was about all he was willing to say. At these depths bailout starts to become a real issue. Most divers are taking to dual rebreathers. This becomes then more costly for development. A couple of months ago I released info on a bailout scrubber/rebreather for commercial divers and that was in the 750ft area that the unit was being wet tested by NEDU.
While saturation provides a very interesting option suspending the diver in stasis for a duration is a concern. During the early planning stages for Wak II Bill King wanted to drill a hole above the main tunnel and wanted to drop the divers in at the 300ft range. This way they could work at the depth and not have the concerns for decompression similar to the Sealab experiments. However, depending on time and depth decompression profiles to get the divers out could take an extended period of time 15 to 28 days depending on the situation.
Recent developments in plastics, batteries, heat retention materials/ fabrics, ballistic fabrics, and a news scrubber material are either here or closer to development.
Cave divers offer perhaps (in my simple mind) the desire to truly try out new products in a terribly unforgiving terrain. We bang things, rub things, stress materials by hanging them on us and wearing them to a degree most recreational divers do not have an idea about. However, we need a trade organization similar to DEMA to bring us materials and ideas for us to try out. We could not only benefit from the material acquisition but if we played out cards right we could start a trade rating process and help manufactures and have something similar to a certification rating- hey if “Scuba lab” can do it we sure as HELL could do it.
I will offer this- I know of a gentleman that has a plastic that is indestructible from most anything we could do to it- it is a specially developed plastic and it can have metal molded into it. Imagine camera housings that you could not break but are clear. Scooter body parts that are restricted to pipe now could be custom sized to any shape, size, or length and again indestructible to us. We see what the future presents us and we can best put it too use.
Just a few thoughts- Sorry for letting my brain loose on the subject.
Andrew
There are so many things that are (I hope) going to happen soon, but I can still see many obstacles.
Deeper dives are possible with Heliox but the Helium is a shitty conductor oh heat, so I suspect that better systems for keeping divers warm are going to be needed. The chemical in Carbon Dioxide scrubbers (starts with a B?) is known to fail if it get too cold, so It may be neccessary to figure a way to keep Scrubbers safe.
I think that in the future all this stuff will need to be integrated together, the use of large DPVs that carry all the systems on them seem like they way to go. Imagine, A diver can zoom to where he need to go, park the DPV, and then explore smaller parts of a system using a self contained unit.
...A couple of months ago I released info on a bailout scrubber/rebreather for commercial divers and that was in the 750ft area that the unit was being wet tested by NEDU...
NEDU passed on it. They were testing it to 727'. I know some of the guys that were on the test team.