Chief Navy Diver Zachary Hanson, MDSU-1 grasp diver and his crew obtained 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 prepare the Coastguardsmen divers on the operation, upkeep and transport of a decompression chamber.”
Joint coaching operations like this assist construct interoperability between companies along with innovating new ways, methods and procedures in an atmosphere 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 units to observe the ocean, climate and the ice to raised perceive the Arctic atmosphere, its significance to the world, and defend it.
Through the mission, Hanson discovered concerning the Arctic’s numerous biosphere, which works to maintain life each above and beneath the large ice sheet.
“Most individuals would assume the Arctic wouldn’t have any life below the ice, however once we had been below there, we noticed jellyfish and a few form of shrimp or krill,” mentioned Hanson.
The MDSU-1 crew is uniquely certified to help any such mission. Hanson and his crew used dry fits designed to guard divers in opposition to hypothermia whereas submerged in 30-degree water. The crew additionally used a twin manifold/twin regulator system to make sure they might proceed to breathe from their tanks if certainly one of their regulators froze over and a particular software that helped hold everybody protected underwater.
“We’ve obtained an ice screw we will use if certainly one of us will get misplaced below the ice,” Hanson mentioned. “Principally, you push it into the ice and cling onto it. With the strobe mild on the again of our tanks, it’s simple to see somebody as a result of the water below the ice is so clear.”
Taking a look at polar ice from above the water, it is perhaps simple to overlook the ice is floating as a result of it displays as much as 80% of daylight, in response to the Nationwide Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Nevertheless, the sunshine shining via the ice causes a brightening impact.
“It’s obtained 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 below the ice, the sunshine is an ideal white, like a form of fluorescent mild. It is because the ice is diffusing the daylight and mixes with the right blue of the water, however if you’re taking a look at deep water, the blue is simply in your peripheral imaginative and prescient. All the pieces you have a look at straight on turns black. It’s very surreal.”
In accordance 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 facet of a Coast Guard cutter, so we would have been in a brilliant distant place, however the precise individuals we rely on for assist had been proper there.”
As a element of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group (EODGRU) 1, MDSU-1 offers prepared, expeditionary, quickly deployable cellular diving and salvage corporations to conduct harbor and waterway clearance, salvage, underwater search and restoration, and underwater emergency repairs in any atmosphere.
