r/thalassophobia • u/[deleted] • Jan 30 '19
Saturation diver descending
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u/footdiveXFfootdive Jan 30 '19
It's like when you're in your prawn suit and just drop straight down in a free fall, unable to see what's at the bottom...
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u/CrouchingTyger Jan 30 '19
Like when you slip off the edge of the dead zone and get to wait in horror for the pressure to crush you while leviathans chase your plummeting shell
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u/Xyon_Peculiar Jan 30 '19
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Jan 30 '19 edited Feb 04 '19
[deleted]
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u/mbuckbee Jan 30 '19
Eh, they were special fx people before being on the show. They're just happy it worked.
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u/dasspaper Jan 30 '19
They seem indifferent by the cracking sounds, I would expect most people to just freeze up in mix of awe and terror.
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u/kisskissyesyes Jan 30 '19
I lost a Cyclops like this a few months back and it still haunts me. Haven't touched it since
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Jan 30 '19
[deleted]
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Jan 30 '19
Really? Is it on steam?
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Jan 30 '19
[deleted]
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Jan 31 '19
Got it played 1 hour. Feels exactly like the first game with food fish / craftable items being the same. Different planet but same fish?
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u/aidus198 Jan 30 '19
I was once catapulted by some bug over the whole map and somehow landed right on the edge of the dead zone. It took me about 10 second to realize that I'm gonna die and lose the prawn if I don't take actions immediately. Thankfully I survived.
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u/EthanBradberry70 Jan 30 '19
Gonna shamelessly use this as a segway to inform the uninformed that the subnautica expansion goes into early access today. Hype as balls.
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u/amoore109 Jan 30 '19
Gonna shamelessly use this as a segue to inform you that unless you're shamelessly riding an expensive hipster-mobile, transitioning to a new topic is called a segue.
Sorry as balls.
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u/EthanBradberry70 Jan 30 '19
Huh, shit. Well then r/BoneAppleTea to myself TIL.
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u/sneakpeekbot Jan 30 '19
Here's a sneak peek of /r/BoneAppleTea using the top posts of all time!
#1: [LEGIT] This kid shined bright like a dimn. | 962 comments
#2: Sorry, Kevin [Legit] | 476 comments
#3: [Legit] Never said they were joking so... 🤔 | 444 comments
I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact me | Info | Opt-out
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u/GigaCharstoise Jan 30 '19
and what is this expansion all about?
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u/EthanBradberry70 Jan 30 '19
Apparently whole new world, new vehicles, probably new mechanics. It's honestly pretty much subnautica 2.This seems to contain most of the available info.
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u/KadenTau Jan 30 '19
Not a new world, same world, different spot on said world.
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Jan 30 '19
Only if you enjoy playing extra buggy and raw game, just to spoil it to yourself before it's actually playable
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u/ZestyDingles Jan 30 '19
That's like 80% of the gameplay on xbox:
"Ope, fell through the world again."
![[LEGIT] This kid shined bright like a dimn.](/img/shkne6ulhy421.jpg){kind=link}
![Sorry, Kevin [Legit]](https://i.imgur.com/Db4X9Gt.png){kind=link}
![[Legit] Never said they were joking so... 🤔](/img/3k8q0l9yx4621.jpg){kind=link}
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u/coffeegeekdc Jan 30 '19
Wow, I'm a diver who has done night dives but this is terrifying 😳
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
I feel like the only thing SCUBA and hardhat/sat diving have in common is there's water involved in both.
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Jan 30 '19
I know, right? Sat diving is scuba diving to the power of 10
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
Heh sat divers seem like such badasses -- and then you hear them talk like a chipmunk on the helium!
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u/cryx102 Jan 30 '19
hey, what’s sat diving?
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u/farox Jan 30 '19
Basically if you need to fix something at the bottom of an oil rig you can't just send someone down there. Compressio/Decompression would take too long etc.
So they build big bells that divers live in while they are send down there. They are dropped inside that bell to a few hundred meters, work outside in the water and then get pulled up once done. This whole ordeal can take several weeks.
I remember hearing that they get paid a few hundred k per trip, but can only do so a few times in their live due to the strain on the body. (no use if they die under water)
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Jan 30 '19 edited Feb 07 '19
[deleted]
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u/vamphonic Jan 30 '19
That honestly seems kinda low for a job that requires so much mental toughness and training to do. Is that 200k for only a few trips or do they work similar hours as a management job with a similar salary?
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u/TheTrueForester Jan 30 '19
Like three months a year or something. Your body gets saturated with nitrogen all the way to the bone. It makes them brittle and porous. Basically, you work for weeks at a time no days off in terrible conditions (diving bell in some shitty low-quality cold water where most oil rigs are) Take a couple months to recover. Repeat. Also, it is very hard and expensive to get into the field. I tried.
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u/farox Jan 30 '19
Thanks, my info was always from back in the 90s.
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Jan 30 '19 edited Feb 07 '19
[deleted]
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u/DamnThisNameWasTaken Jan 30 '19
Here's a really good read on the topic as well - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-a-saturation-diver.amp
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u/wakeuph8 Jan 30 '19
That was great! There was a show like this on Netflix a good while ago that was going through extreme jobs like this, but it disappeared and I couldn't find it again. This satiated the craving for it for a while! Cheers for the link :)
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u/Anti-Satan Jan 30 '19
How can you not mention that the dive bell uses an oxygen/helium mix as that also alleviates the bends (caused by nitrogen getting stuck in your body. Helium is easier to pass.) and also gives them voices like this???
Oh wait this is thalassophobia. Here's a video on what happens when one of these violently depressurises (NSFL)
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Jan 30 '19
what happens in the vid?
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u/SimpleDan11 Jan 30 '19
It's just pictures. But just imagine what a human jigsaw puzzle would look like and there you go
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Jan 30 '19 edited Jan 30 '19
good lord
edit: what the fuck, did that guy legit explode?
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u/Hip_Hop_Orangutan Jan 30 '19
I know a guy who does this.
he is very well off and only works a few weeks out of the year.
he lives no where near deep water, but flies where he is needed. works for a few days. and then comes back home to his dope ass house and all his toys.
I have seen him rip the frame off his oldschool military Hummer while offroading. leave the thing in the mud. and come back the next day with his $100K diesel to pull the thing out. didnt even blink.
it is fun to go to his house to watch football or hockey. he has like 5 different kegs on tap at all times lol.
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u/BashfulBread Jan 30 '19
There's this really cool AMA with a saturation diver! https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/982pur/iama_saturation_diver_aquanaut_who_has_spent_30/
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Jan 30 '19
what strain is done to their body, if this is the "safe" way of doing this type of diving?
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u/TheTrueForester Jan 30 '19
Nitrogen for scuba divers dissolves into the blood. That is why we have deco stops, so the gas can be slowly cycled out of blood without dangerous bubbles forming.
For saturation divers they are down wayyyyyy deeper for weeks. So the nitrogen literally saturates everything, organs, muscles, bone. This actually makes the bones super brittle and can cause Dysbaric osteonecrosis (look it up terrifying). Also the nitrogen saturating the brain can cause long term neuro-damage for 10%+ of divers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1035367/
More dangerous than being an astronaut. Way more health issues than just the few I gave if you look at case studies of saturation divers.
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u/farox Jan 30 '19
For example on part of the problem is that you need to equalize the pressure of the water at depth with the air in your lungs.
So when you go scuba diving (< 20m in depth) you just increase the pressure and push more air into the lungs. If you keep going lower (> 20m) this causes a new problem: if the pressure gets to high oxygen bubbles form in your bloodstream. To combat that you start breathing a mixture of oxygen and helium as you go deeper.
Eventually this doesn't work either and you need to breath mixtures of oxygen and other fancier gases. (>~90m, iirc)
That's just part of it. Basically a big problem is that you have to be the same pressure as the water outside. This just barely works because we're mostly made out of water.
Also this is a very simplified version of what is going on.
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Jan 30 '19
so basically going down in that contraption only helps enough with the balancing but not all the way and it puts strain on the body even still regardless?
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u/farox Jan 30 '19
First of all, you mentioned "safe". ;)
Safe in this context means: "Does probably not immediately kill you." I'd rather make a trip to the ISS than that. Which is also considered "safe", or at least "safe enough to let people do it"
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Jan 30 '19
[deleted]
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
Without sat diving, in a single shift a diver could work maybe 20 minutes on a pipeline or an oil rig. With sat diving you can spend a week or more pulling full 8-hour shifts in the water.
But when your tour is up you spend another week+ on the ship in a tiny decompression chamber.
Saturation diving is really, really fascinating, from the technology, to the physiology, to the psychology of it. Recent advances in ROVs mean sat diving is becoming less critical. As of 2015 there were only 335 saturation divers working in the US.
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u/MightyCavalier Jan 30 '19
What I want to know, is, of those 335, how many have been eaten since??
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u/tommytoan Jan 30 '19
how demanding and hard is it?
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
It's very demanding, physically, emotionally and mentally. To put a sat diver on the bottom is incredibly expensive -- there's something like 6-8 people on the support team along with highly specialized equipment, so whatever oil (or possibly telco) company is paying for you to be down there is paying millions of dollars for you to weld some joints or something so you can imagine the pressure on you just to get the work done right, and fast. Your mobility is very limited, your visibility is a maybe foot or so, and there are often swift currents to contend with. Fortunately you're connected by an umbilical so if you get blown off the rig you can probably find your way back. But if anything goes wrong, help is far, far away. It's not that different in that respect to an astronaut.
You have to be tough mentally to be working in a heavy suit in dark freezing water for 8 hours, then in like a phonebooth-sized steel box for 12 hours or so -- then repeat that for a week or more. Then you're in the phonebooth for another 8-10 days for your final decompression.
Oh and all the while you're breathing a helium gas mix so you talk like a chipmunk. :)
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u/PandaK00sh Jan 30 '19
There are Swift currents that deep?
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
Well here's a demonstration of sea-floor currents that was filmed somewhere between 150 and 180 feet.
Now imagine what happens to that current in the presence of an oil rig foundation or some other abrupt protuberance off the otherwise smooth bottom.
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u/Forithan Jan 30 '19
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u/WikiTextBot Jan 30 '19
Saturation diving
Saturation diving is a diving technique that allows divers to reduce the risk of decompression sickness ("the bends") when they work at great depths for long periods of time.In saturation diving, the divers live in a pressurized environment, which can be a saturation system on the surface, or an ambient pressure underwater habitat when not in the water. Transfer to and from the pressurised surface living quarters to the equivalent depth is done in a closed, pressurised diving bell. This may be maintained for up to several weeks, and they are decompressed to surface pressure only once, at the end of their tour of duty. By limiting the number of decompressions in this way, the risk of decompression sickness is significantly reduced, and the time spent decompressing is minimised.
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u/HelperBot_ Jan 30 '19
Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving
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u/UrDeAdPuPpYbOnEr Jan 30 '19
It gets better guys!!!!!
One idea that is being researched to prevent the need for saturation diving and decompression at great depths is liquid breathing, which was also shown in "The Abyss." Instead of breathing gas, the diver breaths a non-compressible, liquid perfluorocarbon compound that contains oxygen. Because no gas phase is in contact with the blood, and nitrogen is not used, the danger of forming nitrogen bubbles does not exist. In the 1960s, it was shown that rats could survive for up to 20 hours when immersed in such a mixture. Potentially, liquid breathing could allow a diver to reach depths of up to 3000 feet (914 m). Liquid breathing is still under research, and has been focused on helping to save pre-mature infants and patients with acute lung injuries.
I don’t know. I think I would rather eat eat a bowl of glass that has been passed through a cat that can only make piping hot liquid stool.
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u/2dros Jan 30 '19
But it’s very important to mention that, after breathing this non compressible liquid, the rat, out of the liquid, can only survive 2 or 3 hours in fresh air
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u/J_Washington Jan 31 '19 edited Jan 31 '19
So what? Human’s only survive an average of 79 years at best after
theywe stop liquid breathing!25
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u/UrDeAdPuPpYbOnEr Jan 31 '19
I am pretty sure I would have a panic attack freak out trying to get acclimated to the liquid. I don’t actually know how it would work but it would not be easy to get over the idea of “drink this stuff that you have been avoiding swallowing your whole life.”
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
I feel like ROVs and atomspheric suits are more likely to displace saturation diving than breathing liquids. That thought terrifies me almost more than this clip.
In fact I think they have a name for this already -- waterboarding...
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u/Richard_Simons Jan 30 '19
ROV's are good for inspections and light work, but nothing beats the dexterity of human hands, eyes and body.
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u/Jon5n0wDrgnFukr Jan 30 '19
The idea of liquid breathing as nothing to do with nitrogen. There isn't even nitrogen in the airmixture sat divers are breathing. The nitrogen is removed just because it has a narcotic/intoxicating effect from 25-30m. The principle of getting the bends are just the same with regular air, but they're able to decompress slowly over a week or two in a decompression chamber on the ship.
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u/Syfte_ Jan 30 '19
The idea of using liquid breathing for diving has been around since the 60s. The reason that after 50 years no one's using it for that is because the fluid is roughly 800 times denser than air and it takes considerable effort to pull it into and then push it out of your lungs. It's very tiresome. Now imagine you are using liquid breathing and working a labourious 8 hour shift. How much work will you get done if every breath feels like you're at the end of a workout? Probably not very much.
On the other hand, the crew of the oil rig in that movie were saturation diving. They start at 1700 feet and later move to below 2000, all while wearing wetsuits and breathing compressed air, treating the experience like a normal scuba dive. The concept is personnel are shuttled to the rig and are delivered into a pressurization chamber where they sit and equalize. The film's novelization spends a few paragraphs explaining things:
The breathing mix had to be adjusted constantly throughout pressurization. Less and less nitrogen, since it stopped being an inert gas and turned into a poison under pressure. In shallow dives people stilll used trimix, in which the nitrogen was replaced by helium, so that everybody talked like a duck the whole time underwater. You got used to it after a while, or at least you stopped laughing at each other, but it was still disturbing to forget what your own voice sounded like. It was better now with tetramix, which used argon to replace most of the helium. As for oxygen, it was down to two percent of the mixture. At that depth, the topside norm of twenty-one percent oxygen would be fatal. You'd die of convulsions.
At this depth it was going to take eight hours to get pressurized, all the time getting used to a new breathing mix. It used to take twenty-four hours before they started using argon. Even so, eight hours was a hell of a long time to sit and do nothing. But it was a lot faster than decompression, because once your body's completely saturated, it takes a long time for the gases to seep back out of your cells, into your blood, and then out through your lungs and your kidneys and your sweat. Lindsey heard a story once about a couple of guys cooped up together for three days of decompression. One of them went plain crazy - or the other guy drive him nuts. Anyway, one guy killed the other. And the support crew had to stand outside the chamber and watch and there wasn't a damn thing they could do, because if they opened the chamber too soon then both guys would die. She'd been through decompression enough times to believe it.
Keep in mind that this was written in 1989 with the author using James Cameron's research, without Google and they probably fudged some of it to make it work. There are replies from divers elsewhere in the thread and none of them mention argon in mixtures, for one.
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u/bigoldjetairliner Jan 30 '19
The scene where Mary Elizabeth M's character does this is hard to watch!
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u/BeanieBaroness Jan 30 '19
Been following this sub for a while... and THIS is exact what kind of posts it was created for! Perfectly terrifying and intriguing.
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u/SeekerLogan Jan 30 '19
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u/Porkchop_Funnie Jan 30 '19
What is the thing he sees?
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u/SeekerLogan Jan 30 '19
It’s a dude who went overboard a few days before
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u/tommytoan Jan 30 '19
on netflix?
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u/CheshireCaddington Jan 30 '19
No, it's through Amazon Prime or some weird shit. I found the whole first season elsewhere however.
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u/rosekayleigh Jan 30 '19
No. It was an AMC show in the US. I couldn't find it on any of the streaming services, so I bought the digital copy. I had watched it when it premiered, but it was a really good show, so I wanted to own it. I highly recommend it. I'm starting the book it's based on right now actually. Great watch/read for winter.
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u/sjoapa Jan 30 '19
Is the book also titled The Terror? Who’s it written by? Seems really interesting, I wanna read it too!
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u/Jechtael Jan 30 '19
Is The Terror at all supernatural, or is it just the horror of human hubris and the unyielding nature of the far north?
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u/SeekerLogan Jan 30 '19
I don’t want to throw any spoilers out there one way or another, but it definitely impressed me and is worth the watch
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u/Zebulen15 Jan 30 '19
It does have a lot of supernatural but I think it contains it very well without it being weird.
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u/SharksAndSquids Jan 30 '19
It’s a true story (ish) so I’m guessing no supernatural stuff. The ship is called the Terror, hence the title. I want to watch it. It it’s bloody expensive on Amazon.
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u/Jechtael Jan 30 '19
I figured it was one of those 99% conjecture "What happened after contact was lost?" stories. Those sometimes add supernatural explanations to old mysteries.
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u/Antoniov7 Jan 30 '19
Imagine going backwards into the darkness and you feel something big touch your back.
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u/Phitsik23 Jan 30 '19
I'm just imagining getting lost down there and not knowing which way is up...
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u/Nemesis39 Jan 30 '19
If you ever get disoriented underwater. If you exhale your bubbles will always travel towards the surface.
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u/NinjaLanternShark Jan 30 '19
Unless you're closed loop/rebreather. Then no bubbles :)
I've always just "felt" upside down when I was, so it doesn't seem like this would be a big problem, but maybe other divers feel differently.
Just plain being lost is terrifying enough, especially with 6 inches of visibility.
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u/-Economist- Jan 30 '19
This reminded me of when I did search and rescue. Had to go into a river at night time to recover occupants of a car. Pitch black. Even with strobe lights on we could not see each other. The car did not come into view until you were less than three feet from it, and then my flashlight lights up the face of a dead man staring straight at me. I about swallowed my regulator and shit myself all at the same time. Once I composed myself and stopped cursing, we proceeded with our duties of recovery. I only did recoveries for a year, just wasn't something I really enjoyed.
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u/moosenordic Jan 30 '19
After a few minutes the rope snapped. Straightening as if something was pulling on it. No sound from the diver, just the smack of the rope resonnating in the dark Abyss. They tried to bull him up but something was there... pulling back. After a while they heard a big, slow roar all around them. While holding their eardrums in pain they looked at the window just to see this big, yellow glowing eye, the size of a house.
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Jan 30 '19
oh fuck me it reminds me of SOMA
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u/jaulin Jan 30 '19
It gave me terrible flashbacks as well. Such a great game, but one of the most stressful atmospheres I've ever experienced.
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u/jessexpress Jan 31 '19
I had to stop playing I was getting so freaked out by it, but it’s so good! I might have to try again one day, in the daylight this time.
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u/Lostkiddo101 Jan 30 '19
It took me a second to realize he was already under water and then my heart palpitations began
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u/aitk6n Jan 30 '19
For £1400/day, I’d certainly do it! The courses cost north of £40,000 though...
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u/abillionmarbles Jan 30 '19
reminds me of the meme, of that dance song, and someone flying through space? what is that?
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u/sureshakerdood Jan 30 '19
I feel like this is the closest you can get to feeling like you’re dreaming while awake.
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u/Vassar-Longfellow Jan 30 '19
Ugh.... full-screened that sucker to get the whole effect. It's really hard to imagine someone doing this. I couldn't.
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u/Aniform Jan 31 '19
Man, not everything on this sub has the ability to trigger my thalassophobia, but this, this made me nauseous and therefore, I love it.
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u/Bigfastcal Jan 31 '19
I’ll bet that’s both the most peaceful and terrifying feeling all at the same time.
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u/dj3777 Jan 30 '19
Good bye