SCUBA diving jobs
Looking for SCUBA diving jobs? To pursue a career in diving takes both mental and physical toughness. It requires intelligence and normally requires complex technical knowledge. In Professional diving, the diving is rarely an end to itself and a second set of specialist skills to complete tasks underwater is needed. e.g. a commercial saturation diver using an oyxarc cutry torch on a sub pipeline or a diving archaeologist.
Commercial Diving Jobs
This area of diving offers the greatest opportunity with numerous companies employing professional divers from civil engineering firms to the oil/gas industry. The work ranges from canals, rivers, docks and harbours to offshore oil and gas production fields. Traditionally commercial divers have been regarded as underwater labourers, however with the expansion of gas/oil fields development of very complex and expensive systems to allow deeper diving. Today’s commercial diver has to be fully knowledgeable in a wide range of subjects from exotic gas mixtures to the complexities of saturation diving systems. They have to be able to import skills from a technical field to do Specialist jobs such as NDT and high quality welding. The best approach in order not to restrict career options is to train in a good qualification such as a degree, HND etc. while at the same time continuing to dive with an amateur club. Following this education, a commercial diving course can be attended and people with this background become more valuable as the industry becomes more technically demanding.
Diver Instructor
With the global explosion in the popularity and market of sports diving there are increased opportunities for people to have a full time career teaching amateur divers. Most national amateur diving clubs have a qualification system, which includes instructor gradings. Conversely career prospects must be realistically assessed, repetition in teaching classes in a limited number of dive sites make the glamorous lifestyle sometimes associated with this activity look rather less attractive.
Scientific and Research Diving Jobs
Since the Aqualung was commercially available after the Second World War, research diving has been a fast area of recent growth. Large amounts of people need to dive as part of their subject, underwater archaeology, marine biology, oceanography, diving medic and fisheries researchers. This branch of professional divers represents a tiny minority where divers involved are highly qualified in their field of study. Research divers do not always dive religiously but seasonally, and often require amateur divers to help with large-scale projects.
The Effects of Diving
We have evolved to walk on land, swimming underwater is not a natural past time for us. Technological advances fin, aqualung, facemask enable us to swim, see and breathe but these are not enough for continued survival in this foreign environment. The underwater surroundings produce physical and physiological alterations which can cause problems if we fail to adapt. As depth increases the colour of objects is distorted by the absorption of ambient light by seawater, 1m3 of clear sea water (with no suspended sediments) reduces the intensity of light by nearly 60%. The spectrum of colours is diminished as we travel further under the ocean with the red end of the spectrum completely disappearing at 10m resulting in everything taking a eerie blue/green tinge below this depth. As we travel further under the ocean more colours are lost until everything just takes on a grey tinge, this impairs deep underwater photography and in murky water this problem is intensified. The refractive change of light from the water to eyes require the diver to make mental adjustments for size and distance. The altered conduction of sound waves underwater( sound travels at 330ms-1 on surface and ~1400ms-1 in water) means sounds are distorted and it is virtually impossible to judge the direction and position a sound emanates from. To know exactly our position and posture the brainrelies on a number of sensory organs, the vesicular apparatus,position-sensing nerves and skin pressure receptors.These tell us which direction gravity is acting and in conjunction with the eyes give us a virtual horizon. Underwater pressure acts equally over the whole body as sensed by skin pressure nerves, so the body has to rely on the vistibular apparatus to know which way is up since underwater there is no horizon. If old water suddenly rushes into the ear (where the vestibular apparatus resides) the same effect as been spun on a roundabout happens; disorientation. This can be dangerous particularly for inexperienced divers as people have descended further thinking they were heading towards the surface. A good trick is too watch the air bubbles that emerge from the aqualung as these will always float towards the surface.