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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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What civilian diving equipment gets you to 350 feet?

Most of it in fact. While recreational diving is generally restricted to depths less than 100 feet so as to avoid having to worry about decompression sickness. The maximum practical depth for conventional compressed air diving gear is actually closer to 100 m or 350 feet as that is where nitrogen narcosis tends to set in. That the water in that region appears to be shallower than this threshold suggests that a diver could reach it without the need for specialized equipment / breathing gasses.

350 feet as that is where nitrogen narcosis tends to set in

Alright here's where I'm going with this. I'm a lapsed divemaster so my expertise may be rusty, but IMO a dive to 350 feet is considered specialized technical diving even if normies manage to do it with recreational dive gear and not kill themselves. Lots of recreational divers are simply not cut out for that kind of dive with a task.

Adding a bomb payload to the task and bringing it to that depth and securing it stretches credibility for me a bit. Actually, they did this twice, to NS1 and NS2, yes? Yeah. Hard to fathom.

Not saying it's not possible, but the list of suspects would not be very long.

I would love to read their biography.

(If commercial divers that are used to surveying/mining the area did it, that's believable. In that case I was genuinely curious what that equipment is. I have no experience in that stuff.)

Ukraine had oil rigs and thus also commercial divers. Poland has a navy of sorts, so probably professional divers.

The whole are was being patrolled by NATO helicopters in the days ahead, and extensively surveyed during a recent exercise that also involved 'demining' in the depths.

All these unlikely coincidences.

Though I'm working off the dive medicine classes I took while still in the Navy which were a good 15 - 20 years ago now so I might have it all wrong, but my recollection is that any depth from which you'd have to do a staged ascent to avoid the bends is classified as "technical". I remember 350 feet being considered the maximum "safe" depth for conventional scuba gear due to high concentrations of inert gasses in the blood (relative to oxygen) producing a similar effect to intoxication and in more serious cases hypoxia. I don't think that some random normies pulling this off with recreational gear is all that plausible, but I did find it interesting that it was at least hypothetically possible.

In terms of diving deeper, the sort of specialized equipment we're talking about is at a minimum, a pressurized diving helmet (vs conventional mask and regulator) and breathing gear that'll give you a higher concentration of oxygen than the 20% oxygen 78% nitrogen mix you'd get from regular air.