Proceedings of the 2007 International Polar Diving Workshop available

The Smithsonian Institute's Scientific Diving Program has recently held an international workshop on Polar Diving in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. The proceedings are now available here and I have also uploaded them on my own website's download section.

Here is an overview of the contents of this proceedings issue:




Interestingly, the workshop also covered the "USCGC Healy Diving Mishap" where two US coast guard divers died during an under-ice dive. According to the report, there were several serious and hair-raising issues with the divers' qualifications, the site and dive supervision, inadequate training of dive tenders (who apparently were also consuming alcohol), extraordinary amounts of lead weights used by divers ("... in excess of 60 pounds...") and the list just goes on.
As I had blogged a while after the incident, this had also some serious consequences for the commanding officer of the USCGC Healy (see original posting here).

But the proceedings also specify the national requirements for ice diving for the various polar research programs:





Although it is a pretty thick volume to read through, it definitely contains lots of valuable information on polar diving, and not only for scientific diving applications but also for the recreational diver or even underwater photographers.