All About Diving

Deep Diving

The meaning of the term deep diving is a form of technical diving. It is defined by the level of the diver's diver training, diving equipment, breathing gas, and surface support:

• in recreational diving, 30 metres / 100 feet may be a "deep dive"
• in technical diving, 60 metres / 200 feet may be a "deep dive"
• in surface supplied diving, 100 metres / 330 feet may be a "deep dive"

This definition essentially relates to recreational diving. Deep diving may have quite a different meaning in the commercial diving field. For instance the early experiments carried out by Comex S.A. (Compagnie maritime d'expertises) using hydrox and also nitrogen trimix attained far greater depths than any recreational technical diving. One example being the Comex Janus IV open-sea dive to 500 metres, in 1977. The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of Comex divers who performed pipe line connection exercises at a depth of 534 metres in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Hydra 8 programme. These divers needed to breathe special gas mixtures because they were exposed to very high ambient pressure (more than 50 times atmospheric pressure). An atmospheric diving suit allows very deep dives of up to 700 metres. These suits are capable of withstanding the pressure at great depth permitting the diver to remain at normal atmospheric pressure. This eliminates the problems associated with breathing high pressure gases..