Do You Really Know What Saturation Diving Really Means?
One of the hottest subjects among dive watch lovers is saturation diving, which comes with a good reason: a large number of the most interesting and technically advanced diver’s replica watches are typically designed to meet the demands of professional saturation divers. However, it’s not often well understood by participants in the discussions what exactly saturation diving is, and how it differs from diving from, and returning to the surface.
Scuba involves suiting up topside, and descending to depth breathing some breathing gas mixture from compressed air tanks, and then returning to the surface. Deeper diving necessitates the use of an alternative to nitrogen and oxygen as nitrogen can induce nitrogen narcosis at depths as shallow as 30 meters – nitrogen narcosis is often likened to being drunk. For this reason in deeper diving helium and sometimes hydrogen is often used in combination with, or as a substitute for nitrogen; helium, unlike nitrogen, doesn’t cause narcosis at depth.
Divers exit their pressure chamber habitat through an airlock to get to the seafloor and enter a diving bell. The diving bell is then lowered to the seabed (or required working depth) and the divers exit the diving bell to work. A diver fake watch remains on board the diving bell to control the working divers. Once the divers have finished their shift, they re-enter the bell, which is hoisted back to the surface, and the next shift could start. The advantages over scuba are considerable and while only a handful of scuba divers have ever gone deeper than 300m, saturation divers routinely work at depths of 100m to up to 500m.
Saturation diving was developed and used for the first time in the mid-1960s, for commercial diving. Commercial divers working on deeply submerged facilities need to stay down longer than the very limited time that scuba would allow at such depths, and also beyond some depth scuba becomes far too dangerous for regular commercial applications. To improve both bottom time and safety, saturation divers live and work from sealed pressurized chambers on surface support ships. Divers enter the chambers, which are then gradually brought to the pressure the divers will experience at working depth. The term “saturation” refers to the fact that the diver’s body tissues are saturated with the maximum amount of dissolved gasses possible at that depth.
Scuba divers must generally make decompression stops on the way back up to the surface. The reason for this is that as you breathe compressed gasses, they gradually dissolve into your body tissues. Stopping occasionally on the way up permits these dissolved gasses to leave the body gradually and harmlessly.
So perfect enough, there appear to be fewer bad effects if any associated with working as a saturation diver and if done carefully, saturation diving is undoubtedly safe. However, the divers must remain in a pressurized environment for the duration of their work time, which can be as long as 3 weeks or more. This means living in a high-pressure habitat at very close quarters with other Rolex replica watches, under constant video surveillance with no privacy.