By Robert Lamb

People have plunged into the water for food, valuables and a better understanding of their environment for thousands of years, but even the most skilled divers have their limits — the record for a skin diver is 417 feet (127 meters).

Chafing at those limits, humans have dreamed of underwater vehicles and improved diving apparatus for ages. Plato, Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci all wrote about underwater exploration. In fact, early swimming goggles, made of wood and thin slices of shell, date back to at least 14th-century Persia.

Treasure Spurs Sailors to Sea

Diving for sunken treasure has long been a driving force behind the evolution of underwater exploration. When you think of Spanish galleons transporting fortunes in gold and silver during the 1600s and disappearing beneath the waves for anyone’s taking, it’s easy to see why.

The Spanish Crown and the Dutch East India Company, both major players in 17th- and 18th-century international sea trade, offered rewards and percentages on salvaged riches. To take advantage of these incentives, investors pooled their resources to fund recovery expeditions. Whoever had the best underwater technology had the advantage. Given the rewards involved, inventors were willing to test many new technologies.

The Diving Bell and the Steampunk Robot

Some inventors simply tweaked the diving process. In 1690, Edmond Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame) patented the first diving bell. It allowed divers to work from a see-through, submerged, enclosed hemisphere of air on dives of up to 60 feet (18 meters) without surfacing for 90 minutes. Oxygen piped down from above made this feat possible. Modern bells allow divers to work at depths of 1,000 feet (305 meters).

Other technologies amounted to early submersibles, such as John Lethbridge’s 1715 “diving engine.” The wooden barrel body featured glass eyeholes and leather gauntlets for the diver’s hands. The invention resembled a steampunk robot and allowed a diver to work for 30 minutes at depths of 60 feet.

Under Pressure

All that progress came with a price: Deeper water means greater water pressure. As the pressure on a diver’s body increases, more oxygen and nitrogen dissolve in the bloodstream. If you rapidly ascend to the surface, the nitrogen forms bubbles, blocking tiny blood vessels. This condition is known as the bends, or decompression sickness. It can result in joint pain, ruptured blood vessels in the lung, heart attack, spasms, paralysis and stroke.

The bends remained a common condition for divers up until the early 20th century, when a better understanding of the affliction led to improved protocol. Regardless of medical knowledge and modern technology, compression sickness remains an occupational hazard for underwater explorers.

Waiting for Cousteau

Piping compressed air down to divers proved effective, but it kept underwater explorers tethered to the surface. To overcome this, divers needed to bring their air supply down with them. Centuries of invention and research eventually led to the self-contained underwater-breathing apparatus, or scuba.

In 1943, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan developed the Aqua-Lung. Redesigned from a common automobile regulator, this device provides compressed air to a diver at the slightest inhalation. Modern developers continue to fine-tune this technology, for example, by replacing divers’ oxygen supplies with an enriched blend of oxygen and nitrogen called Nitrox.

Alvin and Zeus

Unlike divers, submersible operators typically don’t have to worry about the bends. Once you move below depths of 1,312 feet (400 meters), diving with pressurized air becomes a moot point. Instead, humans have to bring hospitable air pressure down with them by way of submersibles. The disadvantage, however, is that submersibles require heavy-duty materials to prevent excessive outside pressure from crushing the lower air pressure on the inside.

Today, we’ve not only developed such groundbreaking manned submersibles as Alvin, which can operate at depths of 14,764 feet (4,500 meters) for two hours at a time, but we’ve also developed remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

For example, the unmanned Zeus II can explore depths of more than 8,200 feet (2,499 meters). Other work-class ROVs can venture up to 19,685 feet (6,000 meters) below the sea. However, they haven’t eliminated human occupied vehicles yet. Work is under way to develop a new replacement human occupied vehicle that will allow divers to pilot an Alvin-like craft down to depths of 21,326 feet (6,500 meters).

Oil Saves the Day

As always, intense water pressure and low temperatures pose challenges for underwater exploration, but the rise of offshore oil drilling has increased demand for high-performing underwater technology. As technology improves, savvy human explorers are able to explore shipwrecks that have lain beyond our reach for centuries.

By John Hartl

“I loved touching water. Physically. Sensually. Water fascinated me.”

Trying to describe an early memory, of diving into a silty lake and opening his eyes under water for the first time, Jacques Cousteau was instinctively eloquent on the beginnings of a lifelong obsession.

“He was not at all frightened,” adds his Vashon Island-based biographer, Brad Matsen. “The water soothed him and banished all fear.”

Perhaps it was this trauma-less, literally eye-filling underwater experience that led to so many brave confrontations with death, so many narrow escapes, so many advances in the technology of underwater exploration.

When he died on June 25, 1997, Cousteau owned one of the most recognizable faces on the planet. Oscar-winning filmmaker, environmental activist, French resistance fighter and scuba diver extraordinaire, he seemed to jam many lifetimes into one very busy and public one.

Yet, as Matsen deftly demonstrates, we hardly knew him. For all his fame, Cousteau, who had an official wife and two sons, successfully led a secret life that included a mistress and two children. Only after the first wife died would he reveal that he’d had a second family for two decades.

During his later years, Cousteau continued to accept awards, create landmark movies and make speeches for his beloved Cousteau Society. But, as Matsen so wryly puts it, “he saw few people outside his immediate families.” Even then, Cousteau could be snippy. When his older son, Philippe, announced that he would marry an American, Jacques and his wife, Simone, refused to attend the wedding.

The black sheep in the Cousteau history was his older brother, Pierre-Antoine, an anti-Semitic journalist who became a Nazi collaborator. Around the same time, Jacques was spying for the other side, earning the French Legion of Honor for his work.

Possibly the strangest event in their relationship was a 1942 screening of Jacques’ early movie, “Sixty Feet Down,” for an audience of German officers and Vichy politicians in occupied Paris. Pierre-Antoine arranged the screening and a reception. After the war, he was nearly shot for following Nazi orders. Also after the war, Jacques’ follow-up film, “Epaves,” won a special prize at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. One decade later, he would return to take the top Cannes prize for “The Silent World,” which later won a documentary Oscar. In 1965, he would win another Academy Award for “World Without Sun.”

Matsen describes Cousteau’s Oscar winners as huge box-office successes, yet neither led immediately to other films. Cousteau was forced to go into television — where he had his greatest success, collaborating with David Wolper, PBS and eventually Ted Turner. Each of these relationships led to problems too, partly because Cousteau’s ratings winners (sharks, sunken treasures) were often followed by pessimistic programs about lead poisoning, nuclear waste and Japanese fishermen slaughtering dolphins. By the end of his life, he no longer believed that the planet was salvageable.

Where the first Americans came from, when they arrived and how they got here is as lively a debate as ever, only most of the research to date has focused on dry land excavations. But, last summer’s pivotal underwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico led by Mercyhurst College archaeologist Dr. James Adovasio yielded evidence of inundated terrestrial sites that may well have supported human occupation more than 12,000 years ago, and paved the way for another expedition this July.

As part of their 2008 findings, the researchers located and mapped buried stream and river channels and identified in-filled sinkholes that could potentially help document the late Pleistocene landscape and contain artifacts and associated animal remains from early human occupations. Continued exploration, Adovasio said, will be geared toward assessing a human presence on the now submerged beaches and intersecting river channels.

“There’s no doubt that early North American occupations are underwater, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. “We have found the haystack; now we’ve got to find the needles.”

That happens July 23-Aug. 7 when Adovasio leads a team of scientists representing leading institutions from government and higher education to St. Petersburg, Fla., where they’ll resume their search for evidence of early Americans in an area 100-to-200 miles off Florida’s west coast, now about 300 feet under water. For the second year, Adovasio will be assisted by co-principal investigator Dr. C. Andrew Hemmings of Mercyhurst College and the Gault School of Archaeological Research in Austin, Texas. This year as last, the primary funding source is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The decision to take their expedition underwater in the first place, Adovasio said, stems from the premise that early Americans probably hugged the American coastline, congregating around freshwater rivers, before heading inland. At that time, much of the world’s water was confined to glaciers, causing ocean levels to be lower and exposing more of the continental shelf. As the earth warmed and water levels rose, evidence of past settlements became submerged.

Dredging and storms have turned up artifacts on the Gulf Coast as well as the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, but Adovasio said this is the first time a group of scientists has staked out a submerged piece of real estate suspected of containing preserved Ice Age beaches and systematically gone in search of early human occupations.

From the University of South Florida’s research boat, the team will use remotely operated vehicles and remote sensing tools to explore the submerged sites. In shallower depths, divers will inspect sites to collect artifacts and animal fossils and recover sediments for geological analysis and possible radiocarbon testing.

“Proof of past human habitation here would reinforce the disintegration of the once prevalent hypothesis about who the first Americans were, how they got here and when they arrived,” said Adovasio, who rose to fame 30 years ago while excavating the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Pittsburgh, Pa. Radiocarbon dating at Meadowcroft revealed the presence of human campsites as many as 16,000 years ago, which went a long way toward dashing the Clovis-first paradigm, holding that the first humans arrived in the Americas about 12,000 years ago, as revealed by a site near Clovis, New Mexico.

The inaugural expedition confirmed many of the scientists’ original hypotheses and earned second-year funding from NOAA in the amount of $120,000, Adovasio said. Besides NOAA, additional supporters, providing everything from in-kind services to personnel, include the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, the Gault School of Archaeological Research, the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research, the Florida Geological Survey, the University of South Florida, the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, among others, Adovasio noted.

In 1980 EGAT, the Energy Council of Thailand built a hydroelectric dam in an area of Khao Sok National Park which caused the natural river that flowed through the valley to build up into a man made lake shielded by 3 dams and natural limestone cliffs called Cheiw Larn Lake.

As they built the hydroelectric dam it was decided to relocate several villages and towns, leaving buildings and structures behind to be flooded. As the water rose to above 60m it submerged, according to rumour from locals; a temple - otherwise known as a ‘wat’, fire station, houses, school and a police station.
Big Blue Tech have been doing Cavern and Cave diving monthly in Khao Sok this year and while looking for new caves we heard more and more about this feature.

On our last trip we took a translator to the administrative offices of the energy council for the dam in search of a map or survey prior to when the water rose. We we’re lucky to find an old comparative map of a submerged river, villages and the overlying lake we now dive in. With a few weeks of planning and consequent phone calls; a technical diving expedition was arranged in search of these villages and anything else of significant difference.

Diving in Khao Sok is unlike diving anywhere else in the world. For many at Big Blue Tech the thrill of coral reefs and their associated marine life isn’t quite the thrill it used to be. Underwater exploration and the discovery of something new and unique is the ultimate thrill for us.

For someone who has yet to dive in the Khao Sok national park, the best way to envision the experience is to imagine flying through the woods at night, around the trees, over the clearings, across a river and under enormous suspended vegetation covered in freshwater matter or “mung” as referred to in the NSS-CDS Cavern Diving Manual. And then, in the midst of it all: houses with chairs and tables, walkways with fences, buildings with roofs. A feeling much like finding Atlantis perhaps, although this is only about 20 years old of course and it’s pitch black conditions in 22 degree freshwater.

The expedition consisted of 6 team members: James Thornton-Allan, Hannah Lusby, Oskar Sjostrom, Tim Klein, Christos Kardana and Cory Lewis; all technical divers with different backgrounds, disciplines and diving styles. The logistics for this trip would require more technical gear than our usual trips to the same location, including an oxygen booster, double the amount of torches, shot lines and buoy lines and of course enough nitrox and oxygen for 6 dives to 60m, for up to 30 minutes bottom time. Although the oxygen booster is not essential, we needed it to get every drop out of our big 50L oxygen tanks, thus allowing every oxygen cylinder a fill of at least 130 bar.

We all agreed that this trip would be dry, which means no alcohol! Due to the remote nature of the diving and the lack of immediate or speedy emergency support, any risk of a diving related injury or illness had to be minimized. Despite a few grumblings all agreed that this is the correct attitude for such an expedition and this decision was kept until the trip home, which was messy by any standard.

The day of departure was much like normal; taxi fully loaded and off to the pier to catch the night boat to Chumphon. Once there it’s a mini bus ride to the resort with the big blue gear taxi following. Arriving at the resort there is a fury of activity with equipment checks, logistical and mission briefings and everyone kitted up and down to the lake for a check dive. The check dive would introduce conditions new to some team members and make sure all their skills and drills were sharp for the diving ahead. A short moderate dive exposed everyone to the conditions below the freshwater surface and brought everyone back on the longtail boat with laughter and smiles of which many haven’t shown in a while. This dive also allowed James to show Cory and Christos how to shot a mark and tie on. This was essential so our longtail could remain on the site and surface support could respond with short distance if needed.

This was a long first day in a new environment. The recent weather in Koh Tao had been rainy and cloudy, so quite a few were suffering from the new found heat and sun they were suddenly exposed to on the opening day. We finished the day with a quiet dinner and off to bed early in our spacious air-conditioned rooms with large balconeys facing the  stunning park view. Tim -our local multimedia guru- even brought his playstation 3 along just to pass the time while the compressor roared through the night, forcing every possible litre drop into the 6 twin 12L tanks.

Waking at 6am proved too much for some. It was clear Tim was not a morning person and needed a good couple of hours after waking up before anyone could talk to him…a charming chap indeed. A breakfast of eggs, toast and cereal was prepared by Cory and then it was off to the lake for an early morning dive. We brought the compressor with us this time so we could fill our tanks during lunch at a floating resort during the surface interval. During these dives we explored different areas of the villages, some found a hut while others found a chair but still had yet to find the large concrete structures reported by the locals. Although finding man made buildings was great, it was not exactly what we were looking for and it didn’t help us get closer to the centre of the village. We could have been 500m away, which at 60m might as well be 10 miles. With staggered diving for surface cover the day was long but with plenty of food and water it flew by quicker then most expected.

The next day we decided to explore a different mark of the map which indicated  a cluster of villages. Speaking to the locals we realised more and more that they have less and less of a definitive idea of what lies beneath and realized that a small village in a jungle over 20 years ago wouldn’t look the same as what we recognize Thailand villages today. With that in mind we lowered our expectations of submerged roads and shopping malls to simply looking for bamboo huts, pathways and woodland clearings and the new search patterns and mission briefings were completed. The dives that followed proved successful as we started to find, still at 60m in pitch-black conditions, wardrobes, chairs, simple man made structures, clearings of purpose cut trees and pathways. Unfortunately they were all surrounded by heavy forest and covered in freshwater detritus making it hard to follow an individual pathway. In agreement with the local stories, it was clear that they were all connected by a deeper path, in this case the old river that supplied the water to build the lake. By this time everyone was tired and a bit sun kissed but very excited and satisfied with the days diving. We still had one more place to look, which would be on our final day, consisting of a big dive with 30 minute bottom time.

The wind had picked up and the waves were crashing over the bow of the longtail as we arrived on site the next morning. Broken into groups to explore for one last effort, the divers’ descents down the line were staggered, with surface cover at the ready. After a 70minute exploratory Oskjar and Cory returned to the surface, while Hannah had a longer bottom time and was still doing her decompression on a lift bag. Retrieving the nitrox tanks the second group descended down the buoy line, while Hannah surfaced with good news, finding a concrete pillar and signs of a town. This definitive sign of man made dwellings, was what we have been searching for all along and Tim who had yet to dive could return down her reel line, and conduct a further search within proximity of all these newly found structures. Tim was successful; his sightings allowing us to positively identify the temple area.  Among other things Tim found a large water reservoir and concrete structures including a 10m by 10m square block with 3 steps rising to a plateau. On this plateau were steel pipe supports for a roof and a concrete pedestal.  Typically Thai temples in small villages have a simple concrete centre with a Buddha or relic where offerings are placed. In speaking with the locals they confirmed that we had found the village near the temple and that we needed to look further south in search of the old building. Further research and interviews with locals bought new information to light. The temple was primarily made of wood. This would suggest the intergrity of the temple is most probably reduced to its concrete foundations. However, the discovery meant we had an exact gps mark to the village that was home to the temple.

Despite the trip having a somewhat bitter sweet finish, our discovery leaves us with so much more to be explored and discovered. Returning to the resort, it was kit break down and equipment sorting. The usual farewells ensued before departure to Chumphon for the night boat back to Koh Tao.

For the team we head back to Koh Tao for more technical diving activities and expedition planning, as we look forward to more exploration and discovery in the future.

If you would like to join us on the next expedition to The Khao Sok National Park contact us at info@bigbluetech.net

More info here and here