Chief Navy Diver Zachary Hanson, MDSU-1 grasp diver and his crew acquired underway aboard the icebreaker USCGC Healy (WAGB 20) in Seattle to conduct ice diving operations alongside U.S. Coast Guard divers. Throughout their time aboard, Hanson and his crew additionally supplied coaching on the decompression chamber they introduced with them.
“They [the Coast Guard] don’t have a decompression chamber, however they’re getting one,” mentioned Hanson. “We allow them to use ours for this mission performed for the Workplace of Naval Analysis (ONR), and we helped practice the Coastguardsmen divers on the operation, upkeep and transport of a decompression chamber.”
Joint coaching operations like this assist construct interoperability between providers along with innovating new techniques, strategies and procedures in an setting as difficult because the Arctic Circle.
ONR and Healy’s mission was to watch arctic ice. They used stationary climate buoys outfitted with a number of gadgets to watch the ocean, climate and the ice to raised perceive the Arctic setting, its significance to the world, and learn how to defend it.
In the course of the mission, Hanson discovered concerning the Arctic’s various biosphere, which works to maintain life each above and under the huge ice sheet.
“Most individuals would assume the Arctic wouldn’t have any life underneath the ice, however once we had been underneath there, we noticed jellyfish and a few type of shrimp or krill,” mentioned Hanson.
The MDSU-1 crew is uniquely certified to help one of these mission. Hanson and his crew used dry fits designed to guard divers towards hypothermia whereas submerged in 30-degree water. The crew additionally used a twin manifold/twin regulator system to make sure they may proceed to breathe from their tanks if one in all their regulators froze over and a particular device that helped preserve everybody secure underwater.
“We’ve acquired an ice screw we will use if one in all us will get misplaced underneath the ice,” Hanson mentioned. “Principally, you push it into the ice and grasp onto it. With the strobe mild on the again of our tanks, it’s straightforward to see somebody as a result of the water underneath the ice is so clear.”
polar ice from above the water, it is perhaps straightforward to overlook the ice is floating as a result of it displays as much as 80% of daylight, based on the Nationwide Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Nevertheless, the sunshine shining by way of the ice causes a brightening impact.
“It’s acquired to be the clearest water I’ve ever dived in my life,” Hanson mentioned. “This time of 12 months, there’s daylight 24 hours a day, and from underneath the ice, the sunshine is an ideal white, like a type of fluorescent mild. It’s because the ice is diffusing the daylight and mixes with the proper blue of the water, however once you’re taking a look at deep water, the blue is simply in your peripheral imaginative and prescient. Every little thing you take a look at straight on turns black. It’s very surreal.”
In line with Hanson, most arctic dives are extremely distant, and whereas some may argue the Beaufort Sea is as distant because it will get, the MDSU-1 divers had a singular lifeline proper at hand.
“We’re skilled to name the Coast Guard if a diver will get in hassle,” Hanson mentioned. “However on this case, we had been diving proper off the aspect of a Coast Guard cutter, so we would have been in an excellent distant place, however the precise folks we depend on for assist had been proper there.”
As a element of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group (EODGRU) 1, MDSU-1 offers prepared, expeditionary, quickly deployable cell diving and salvage firms to conduct harbor and waterway clearance, salvage, underwater search and restoration, and underwater emergency repairs in any setting.
