Fabien Cousteau Takes Plunge To Beat Grandfather's Underwater Record 84
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."
Re:I don't understand how this is a "record" (Score:2, Informative)
They weren't doing it for attention; Fabien is. Separate categories,
Re:I don't understand how this is a "record" (Score:5, Informative)
This is the headline:
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" (Score:5, Informative)
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) [wikipedia.org]
Re:I don't understand how this is a "record" (Score:4, Informative)
This is the headline:
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.