Preface

This has been my most challenging text to write. Over the years and across scores of writing I have indeed done - grant proposals, operational standards, white papers, technical papers, safety plans, popular articles, gear reviews, training manuals, books, and blogs – all have proved far easier than the work you have just begun to peruse. The reason is that each project had a defined start, middle, and end. They were each tackled with a specific outcome in mind and were edited toward completion to meet that purpose. This work is different in that it was itself from the inside out. There was no previously cut path to follow in conducting the work that inspired this text, considering that it may afford a more widespread adoption of rebreathers for diving.

Purposeful task and mission-guided undersea intervention has been, and is still in many respects, a blank slate with nothing but opportunity on the horizon. This is only limited by our need to shift the communal mindset to one where principles in atmospheric management are embraced as fundamental cornerstones of every single person’s diving career, from Day 1, and thereafter recognizing that the building blocks to manage this atmosphere are life critical.

As of completing the first comprehensive draft of this material (2018), it had been almost 20 years since I took my first glimpse into the deep – in my case, the view was from sub-300 feet (90 meters) of depth and staring into the alluring abyssal depths of Exuma Sound in the Bahamas. That one short foray of just a handful of minutes, limited by open-circuit diving, was tasked to acquire as much data as possible. As a person, generally but also a scientist in-depth, it became immediately obvious to me that there were benefits to ‘being there’.

 My hands could perform dexterous tasks, my brain allowed real-time decision-making, and my fingers were able to manipulate flora and fauna given spatial awareness of the environment – all things that robotics and remote instrumentation still to this day cannot match. The brief experience allowed me to consider how we might most efficiently intervene for improved data and knowledge-gathering purposes in the future.

Challenging efficiency was all it took – I knew that we could do much better, the underwater community, me included, could do much better.  Thus, this exploration was more than my calling – it was the path to some yet tangible means of better understanding the world around us and ultimately improving our human state of existence both with and within it. The resulting constant inquisition: How can we do this more efficiently? How can we be more productive? How can we safely mitigate the risks? How can we benefit from broader access to this environment? – All fueled both my creative and inventive palettes and continues to whet my appetite for more knowledge and an improved human experience during our short foray called life here on the Blue Planet.

Despite these decades passing and much work done by myself and others, still, to this day, nothing much has changed from the standpoint of ‘technical diving for science’. This content, in part, shares elements of why that is and is a critical page in the blueprints for how we might move through that to re-establish the value of humans beneath the sea in a broader context than is realized today.

My approach to solving this problem of advancing human capacity beneath the sea has not shied away from challenging the convention. The convention was always seemingly fraught with obvious limitations – I have fortuitously encountered challenges and even blockades at every corner turned.

 Even with the best diving technology and techniques available, today it is still evident that widespread deep, long-duration, or technical diving for science is just not an easy nut to crack. Throughout my career, there has been no shortage of committees, focus groups, public and private initiatives, and plenty of dreamers all purporting to have the solution to affording manned science at depth. Many of these attempts have come from individuals seeking to envelop technical diving within institutional frameworks.

I have been there too, and now believe it is a misstep, and nearsighted – the value of humans ‘being there’ is far bigger than can come from any singular institution or diving program. For a myriad of reasons, aside from meeting niche data acquisition for a very few select persons, no academic technical diving initiatives have amounted to much, nor are they likely to – I have learned that the solution is not a technical one per se, rather it’s a social one.

We have had the tools to advance diving science and scientific diving for hundreds of years – it’s now about how we put them to work, and as I hope to present throughout this material, putting these tools to work means adopting a very different and immensely broad mindset to human intervention. This requires an embrace of concepts in atmospheric management exceedingly early in one’s career to better understand what is possible, where the possibilities become practicable, and to cast cohesive visions that put to work the concepts in a way that offers tangible gain.

While initially educated as a marine biologist, despite plenty of opportunities, I willingly forwent life in academia for the ‘life aquatic’ – a living and breathing personal experiment to make a career of and further build a life intimately intertwined with the sea, as a diver. Like many divers, the bug to seek out solutions to the challenges of depth and duration is ravenous. In my case, the driver was an ambition to conduct science routinely within these environments – with a dream of thinking that it might occur in a manner analogous to how science has been conducted in the shallows for three-quarters of a century using open-circuit SCUBA. While at school as a budding marine scientist, I was doing double duty as a working inshore commercial diver. When faced with this deep diving for science challenge, somehow my instincts just knew that the problem would not be solved from an academic standpoint alone. So, I committed to an early career trajectory as a working diver, expecting that this body of knowledge, from the trades, and quite literally daily immersions, would help assemble the parts and pieces and know-how needed to crack the nut, so to speak.

I survived my tour of duty as a commercial diver, working as a subcontractor for an inshore mom-and-pop company for almost two decades as my primary employment, and have seen the good and the bad. 

Commercial diving itself is not easy – I’ve spent thousands upon thousands of hours working blindly in the mud; the advantage gained was having had all that time to think through how human intervention can be improved upon. Minute by minute I was experiencing the myriad of challenges faced with more efficient human interventions - every single day I was troubleshooting problems, and it was this demonstrated need for innovative strategic thinking that has guided me through solutions and creating opportunities on the scientific side of things.

While at times obvious on paper, underwater intervention problems are vastly complex – in addition to technical and physical/physiological complexities, there are regulatory norms and social structures within the underwater community that have distinctly evolved to prohibit addressing some of the challenges exposed, creating barriers to entry in making any real advancements.

Cross-collaboration to adopt technology, capabilities, and problem-solving mindsets is very much needed now more than ever. Breaking this down, in my opinion, is the solution to the deep- or technical diving for science conundrum, and that breakdown can only take place when we shift a communal mindset to adopting the highly disruptive yet enabling technology, we call rebreathers.

While the future of humanity’s role within the ocean is a wide-open philosophical debate, it remains a fact that we require technology to intervene at any functional scale beyond a single breath hold. Beyond that, we can dip our toes with open-circuit SCUBA or jump off the deep end with atmospheric vehicles. A fact is that bridging these two opposing forces requires advancing and exploiting the current body of knowledge surrounding rebreathers, and this will take place throughout multiple lifetimes.  Failing to do so means progress in human intervention stops altogether – yes, I mean that in the biggest and sincerest way - rebreathers are the commonality between all advanced diving systems from personal rebreathers to subs, to habitats, to atmospheric suits. These systems all depend on a deepened embrace of principles in atmospheric management, and that knowledge needs to become part of our everyday conversation, even for non-divers, as we face imminent planetary health crises.

My pursuits in this space have brought both tremendous success and dire failure. I’ve started small businesses, maxed out credit cards, been awarded grants and various scholarships, attracted sponsors, declared bankruptcy, and sold off everything but my vital organs – all in my quest to improve human performance in this poorly understood aquatic environment, enable the science community to benefit from this exploration, subsequently shared the discoveries made with our future generations, and, most importantly, learn a little bit more about myself.

Since the first edition of this content was published in 2019 as a limited edition print book, much has been learned. I have elected to offer the material in this more accessible format, digitally, as a more refined manuscript that will continue to evolve in real-time, as do several details and manners of thinking that contribute to the very necessary steps in open sourcing the magic of closed-circuit.

Dive Safe.

ML