Discover Top Posts Tagged with #saturation diving

Big fish project,,,

Close-ups & image IDs below cut!

#my art #mixed media #traditional art #coelacanth #Body horror #body horrow cw #scopophobia #scopophobia tw #artists on tumblr #OC: Amari Hayes #OC: Riley Calder #Story: Point Nemo #Saturation diving #gotta upload this here so i can post it on my artfight

astronauts or saturation divers

astronauts

saturation divers

Voting ended onAug 11, 2025

#fight!#lazy sunday shenanigans #respect to both but #only one right answer 😌#the overlap? cool helmets #nerves of steel probably #and opening a window will kill you #reblogs for max nerdery much appreciated #astronaut #astronauts #diving #diver #divers #saturation diving #mariner #polls

Currently obsessed with the inside of saturation diving bells

#saturation diving #under water #deep sea #retro futuristic #reminds me of alien

That’s my emotional support saturation diver, Sir 🥺

#last breath #documentary #Chris lemons #ocean #deep ocean #digital artist #digital art #drawing #art #instagram: mlter #small artist #procreate art #procreate drawing #procreate #diver #saturation diver #saturation diving

One of the world's most hazardous jobs is known for its intense pressure.

For 52 straight days this winter, Shannon Hovey woke up in the company of five other men in a metal tube, 20 feet long and seven feet in diameter, tucked deep inside a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. He retrieved his breakfast from a hatch (usually eggs), read a briefing for the day, and listened for a disembodied voice to tell him when it was time to put on a rubber suit and get to work. Life in the tube was built around going through these same steps day after day after day … while trying not to think about the fact that any unintended breach in his temporary metal home would mean a fast, agonizing death.

“Hovey works in one of the least known, most dangerous, and, frankly, most bizarre professions on Earth. He is a saturation diver—one of the men (right now they are all men) who do construction and demolition work at depths up to 1,000 feet or more below the surface of the ocean.

“Diving to that depth—or just about any depth—involves breathing pressurized air. Inert gases in it, such as nitrogen, dissolve benignly into your blood and tissues—as long as the weight of all the water above you keeps them compressed. But when you want to return to the surface, that gas needs time to diffuse out slowly. If not, if a diver shot straight to the surface, the gas would form bubbles, like in a shaken can of soda. Inside that diver’s body, it would be as if millions of tiny explosives began to detonate. Known as the bends or, more technically, decompression sickness, the condition can be catastrophically painful and debilitating, and, depending on the depth, nearly impossible to survive. Diving to 250 feet for an hour, for example, would require a five-hour ascent to avoid getting even slightly bent. (The condition was first seen in the 19th century, when men leaving pressurized caissons, used to dig tunnels and build bridges, mysteriously took ill and began dying.)

“The world—and, specifically, the oil and gas industry—needs commercial divers like Hovey who can go to the seabed to perform the delicate maneuvers required to put together, maintain, and disassemble offshore wells, rigs, and pipelines, everything from flipping flow valves, to tightening bolts with hydraulic jacks, to working in tight confines around a blowout preventer. Remotely operated vehicles don’t have the touch, maneuverability, or judgment for the job. And so, a solution. Experiments in the 1930s showed that, after a certain time at pressure, divers’ bodies become fully saturated with inert gas, and they can remain at that pressure indefinitely, provided they get one long decompression at the end. In 1964, naval aquanauts occupied the first Sea Lab—a metal-encased living quarters lowered to a depth of 192 feet. The aquanauts could move effortlessly between their pressurized underwater home and the surrounding water, and they demonstrated the enormous commercial potential of saturation diving. It soon became apparent that it would be easier and cheaper to monitor and support the divers if the pressurized living quarters weren’t themselves at the bottom of the sea. At this moment, all around the world, there are commercial divers living at pressure inside saturation systems (mostly on ships, occasionally on rigs or barges), and commuting to and from their jobsites in pressurized diving bells. They can each put in solid six-hour working days on the bottom.

“Hovey and his fellow divers spent that six-week assignment working at the relatively shallow (but still quite deadly) depth of 250 feet, and living in a shipboard capsule pressurized to the same level. Pressure can be measured in atmospheres (atm) or pounds per square inch (psi). Pressure at sea level is 1 atm, or 14.7 psi. Inside a bicycle tire is about 65 psi. Hovey was living at over 110 psi. An ocean-and-a-half away, diver Steve Tweddle was making his way through a 28-day job in “storage,” as they call it, for work at a depth of 426 feet (190 psi) in the North Sea. The Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea share a history of offshore drilling, sparked by the worldwide oil crisis of the 1970s, which sent prices skyrocketing and saw offshore oil and gas rigs pop up like giant galvanized lily pads. The vast majority of saturation dives are for maintaining or taking down this oil and gas infrastructure...”

It’s a long article, but the whole experience described is really quite fascinating.

#underwater #diving #dangerous jobs #saturation diving #ladies and gentlemen I present to you: the ocean