Fabien Cousteau Takes Plunge To Beat Grandfather's Underwater Record

An anonymous reader writes Fabien Cousteau, grandson of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, plans to spend 31 days underwater off the coast of Key Largo, Florida. He has already spent 3 weeks in an underwater laboratory called the Aquarius, and hopes to break his grandfather's record of 30 days in an undersea habitat. "There are a lot of challenges physically and psychologically," said Cousteau, 46, who grew up on his grandfather's ships, Calypso and Alcyone. Cousteau added: "We'll be able to do Twitter chats, we'll be able to do Skype sessions, we'll be able to do Facebook posts and Instagram posts and all these things that we take for granted on land, but up until now it was impossible to do from down below."

Comments

I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Blakey Rat]

Ballistic missile submarines regularly spend 80+ days underwater, even during peacetime. How is 30 days a record?

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Anonymous Coward]

They weren't doing it for attention; Fabien is. Separate categories,

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[i kan reed]

Because subs have tight clausterphobic environments, a need for constant quiet, severe rationing, constant work to keep sailors busy, and a chain of command to shit all over you.

Clearly they're just too nice an environment to count.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[DocSavage64109]

This does illustrate how impressive it is to be on the crew of a submarine. Just thinking about it makes me feel claustrophobic.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[gstoddart]

This is the headline:

Fabien Cousteau Takes Plunge To Beat Grandfather's Underwater Record

What is your source of confusion?

It's not a world record, it's longer than Jacques Cousteau did it.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[timrod]

Underwater Penis sounds like the name of a metal band.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Opportunist]

Race you to the trade mark office!

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[gstoddart]

Why ever for? He's advocating for finding ways to do it better. You think he should hobble himself with the best of 1970s technology?

Look, this is a PR stunt, and a press release designed to drive awareness to him. Let's not suddenly start acting like he needs to recreate the exact same conditions to be able to say he stayed down longer than his very famous grandfather.

You have to remember what this is before you start arguing the semantics of it. Because there's not a lot of point or value in doing that once you remember that this is mostly a stunt, with some actual attempts to do some research.

At the end of the day, he's saying "I will do this longer than my grandfather did, but with newer technology -- and if people didn't mention my grandfather, nobody would even cover this". Because he's nowhere near as famous as his grandfather was in his day.

This is as much about awareness (and probably fund raising) as it is the specifics of the 'record'.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Blakey Rat]

Hm. Ok, good point.

Then I guess the question is, "why the hell is this newsworthy?"

Alternate headline: "Guy Does Something 10,000+ People Have Already Done"

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Major Blud]

I see how it could be read that way. It would have been better to say "will stay underwater longer than his grandfather" instead of "will beat grandfather's record", which could be read as his grandfather holding a record in the first place.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[gstoddart]

Say you have a very famous grandfather.

Now say you've gone into the 'family business', but you're not nearly as famous as he is.

Now say you'd like some publicity.

Do you:

• a) mope that nobody ever pays attention to anything you do
• b) name drop the hell out of your grandfather so people will at least tune in

In the 70s damned near everybody knew who Jacques Cousteau was. The kids born recently likely have no idea.

But if you can get the press to invoke your famous grandfather to get you a little PR for your stuff ... well, such is modern life.

He's media whoring because he has his grandfather's name.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[westlake]

Ballistic missile submarines regularly spend 80+ days underwater, even during peacetime. How is 30 days a record?

The submarine keeps you underwater. The Aquarius lab puts you in the water.

Aquarius consists of three compartments. Access to the water is made via the 'wet porch', a chamber equipped with a moon pool, which keeps the air pressure inside the wet porch the same as the water pressure at that depth ('ambient pressure'), about 2.6 atmospheres, through hydrostatic equilibrium. The main compartment is strong enough, like a submarine, to maintain normal atmospheric pressure, and can also be pressurized to ambient pressure, and is usually held at a pressure in between. The smallest compartment, the Entry Lock, is between the other two and functions as an airlock in which personnel wait while pressure is adjusted to match either the wet porch or the main compartment.

Because Aquarius allows saturation diving, dives from the habitat can last for up to nine hours at a time; by comparison, surface dives usually last between one to two hours. These long dive times allow for observation that would not otherwise be possible. Way stations on the reef outside Aquarius allow aquanauts to refill their scuba tanks during dives.

This design enables personnel to return to the surface without the need for a decompression chamber when they get there. Personnel stay inside the main compartment for 17 hours before ascending as the pressure is slowly reduced, so that they do not suffer decompression sickness after the ascent.

Aquarius (laboratory)

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Rob the Bold]

This is the headline:

Fabien Cousteau Takes Plunge To Beat Grandfather's Underwater Record

What is your source of confusion?

It's not a world record, it's longer than Jacques Cousteau did it.

True, but at first glance the reader might be thinking a "world record" and not a "family record". Only when delving into TFA does one discover that there is a carefully crafted (and accurate) headline enticing one to read a much less interesting story. Sure, a family record for diving in the Cousteau family is a bigger deal than say, most cigars smoked in a 4-hour period -- set by my grandfather in 1966 -- in my family. But, like so many true stories, they're both kind of lame.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus if your boss is a prick and you quit during the work day you got an easy drive home instead of trying to swim to shore.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[Jjeff1]

Their compression setup makes absolutely no sense to me. The wikipedia article is either wrong, or someone doesn't know what they're doing. When you dive, your body absorbs gasses into your bloodstream. You have to ascend slowly to let the gasses out. Ascend too quickly, and it's like opening a soda bottle in your blood. With a deep dive (say 300 feet), that could take hours. The longer/the deeper you go, the more gasses you absorb, up to a certain point. This is what is meant by a saturation dive. Your body is fully saturated with as much extra gasses as it can hold at whatever depth you're at, working there longer doesn't make you absorb any additional gasses, so the ascent takes the same amount of time, no matter how much additional time you spend at depth.

So, in a saturation dive, you exit the water to a chamber which is at THE SAME pressure as the surrounding water. Which means from a pressure perspective, you don't ascend. You're just getting out of the water. You sit inside the chamber, have some lunch, get some sleep, whatever. You can go back and forth between the chamber and the water without waiting for any decompression.

But with their setup, you exit the water into the moon pool, then go into the Entry lock, where the pressure is adjusted to surface level pressure (ascending). But remember how this can take hours? You're stuck inside the Entry lock, and no one can go in or out of it until you're done.

80 feet isn't horribly deep. You can stay down for 40 minutes and ascend directly, without having to decompress at all. But 8 hours at 80 feet puts you at almost 6 hours of decompression time. seriously.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[kwbauer]

Which is why the habitat turns into a decompression chamber for a 17 hour cycle at the end of the stay at the bottom. This would basically get the "residents" back to Group A and then they can use the airlock to get into the pool then exit the habitat and surface just as if they had started that final dive from the surface.

Re:I don't understand how this is a "record"

[eyegor]

There's a difference between technical work and being tech support. Usually, the latter are the ones not good enough to be systems administrators. Higher tier tech support comes close, but nearly every tech support person I've met was some drone who read solution recipes out of a book.

Submarine crews are usually very intelligent and highly skilled at their job. They can't count on outside support and have to be able to operate autonomously for weeks or months on end. When sub sailors get out of the Navy, they're usually able to find suitable employment quickly and have the mental tools to do nearly anything they like.

I was a Sonar Technician (STS1(SS)) on two 688 class attack subs for 6 years and stayed in the ASW world for a few years after getting out of the Navy, then shifted into systems engineering and Unix administration. I'm now a systems architect running large-ish distributed computational clusters. I know of guys who became electrical engineers, doctors, teachers, etc.

I don't get it.

[Major Blud]

At first I read the headline and thought "oh, he's going to be underwater using scuba gear for 31 days, awesome", but after reading the article he's going to spend 31 days in an "undersea lab". That's supposed to be a record of some type? Don't sailors in both the U.S. and Russian Navy spend many months at a time submerged in nuclear subs? If it is a record, it states that his grandfather holds it at 30 days....but fails to mention that Scott Carpenter spent that same amount of time in SEALAB II. So which is it?

Re:Twitter, Skype, Instagram, Facebook...

[gstoddart]

When you need to keep up the PR campaign, I'd say it's indispensable.

This whole thing is at least 25% PR stunt, as much as 100% depending on your cynicism.

And, the reality is, if you want people to pay attention to you these days, you pretty much do it via these things.

And since people have shorter attention spans, if you didn't remind them you were still there ... they'd forget entirely by day 2.

Am I the only one ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who read "grandfather's underwear record" while skimming the page? That was a bit odd. I thought the record was about wearing the same underwear for 31 days.

Re:Twitter, Skype, Instagram, Facebook...

[Overzeetop]

Now we know why the record attempt would be such a feat of mental fortitude.

All for money

[Overzeetop]

What everyone else gets - money. He/they need funding to continue their lifestyle^wresearch. From wikipedia:

"Due to budget cuts, NOAA ceased funding Aquarius after September 2012, with no further missions scheduled after a July 2012 mission that included pioneering female diver Sylvia Earle in its aquanaut crew. The University of North Carolina Wilmington was also unable to provide funding to continue operations. The Aquarius Foundation was set up in an attempt to keep Aquarius functioning."

Foundations don't run on cool research, they run on dollars. Dollars requires interest, and interest comes from PR/marketing. Hence the stunt.

Submariners can have fun too

[cruff]

My cousin served on an attack sub years ago, and he told me about the "diving parties" they had to break in the new junior grade lieutenants on their first patrol. When said lieutenant was standing watch, the diving party call would go out. The party members would all run to the rear of the boat, and the Lt would call for the necessary trim changes. Then the party would run to the front of the boat, repeat as required until the Lt figured out what was going on. Good training for the newbie.