DEPTH Blog

Photo Caption: The decompression chamber aboard the USS Dixon where David Scalia suffered his third cardio-respiratory arrest. Dr. Greg Adkission successfully resuscitated David and remained with him in the chamber for 12 hours.

Curious to explore the undersea world, Alexander the Great used a glass diving bell to submerge himself below the surface. The fish, it is said, “crowded around him in homage.” In 332 BCE, he ordered soldiers to submerge inside diving bells and destroy the enemy’s underwater defenses.

More than 100 years ago, Sorbonne Professor Paul Bert, the father of pressure physiology, explained, “All symptoms, from the slightest to those that bring on sudden death, are the consequences of the liberation of bubbles of nitrogen in the blood [on-gassing], and even in the tissues, when compression has lasted long enough. The great protection is slowness of decompression [off-gassing].”

If you're a diver, you've most likely heard of the "bends" or "divers disease."

We recently caught up with Asser Salama, author of the new release, Deep Into Deco: The Diver's Decompression Textbook. Asser is a technical diver and instructor, is founder of Tech Diving Mag and developer of Ultimate Planner decompression planning software. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s degree in business administration. A software developer with an interest in decompression modeling, Salama plans to implement computational algorithms based on credible research papers to prevent some pioneering work from fading into academic obscurity.