Submarines are fairly cool bits of equipment. They’ll provide researchers an unequalled view of the ocean flooring, assist get your hands on lacking wrecks beneath the waves and may even ferry in regards to the wealthy and well-known, with blended outcomes. Whereas all that may be very cool, there’s one draw back to driving in a deep sea submarine: you would possibly find yourself sounding fairly foolish.
When a submarine dives under the floor, it’s a very sealed system, with the crew taking down all the pieces they’ll want on their journey to the ocean flooring. This contains important provides, snacks, any tools they need and even the air they’ll must breathe.
With regards to taking sufficient air for a visit, crews flip to compressed gasses that may be piped into their cabin as required. Normally, a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen is ok because it replicates the type of air we breathe on the floor. Once you go deeper, nonetheless, that’s not as protected to make use of.
As an alternative, on for much longer and deeper journeys to the ocean flooring, subs are loaded up with a fuel referred to as heliox, which is a mix of helium and oxygen. This combination is used on saturation diving missions, the place crews sink to the ocean flooring in specifically designed subs for as much as 28 days at a time.
Throughout these journeys, they stay and work contained in the craft and in addition exit the vessel to hold out work on issues like oil rigs and underwater cables. When spending so lengthy beneath the waves, the heliox fuel provides crews of deep sea submarines a greater blood oxygen saturation and means they’ll stay protected underneath the water, defined glorious Instagrammer Geo Rutherford in a latest publish.
As we speak, the helium/oxygen mix is utilized by anybody diving to 190 ft or larger, and its benefits makes deep-sea diving a lot safer. In addition to these fairly vital benefits, heliox does carry with it a slightly amusing facet impact: it makes you sound a bit like a chipmunk.
As a result of helium is a much less dense fuel that oxygen, it permits your vocal cords to vibrate far more shortly while you communicate, explains the Franklin Institute. As your vocal chords are vibrating faster, the pitch of your voice rises to comical ranges, which means that everybody on a deep-sea dive comes again to the sub sounding like a cartoon character, as you possibly can see within the video above.
The combination of helium and oxygen has been utilized by divers on deep-sea tasks for years, defined the US Naval Undersea Museum in a latest weblog publish. It was developed within the Nineteen Thirties for the only real objective of serving to scuba divers head deeper into the oceans, as the location explains:
In Might 1939, submarine USS Squalus (SS 192) sank in 243 ft of water. The salvage operation offered the primary actual take a look at of NEDU’s helium-oxygen respiration combination. After divers skilled disorienting nitrogen narcosis whereas respiration air, they have been switched to helium. Respiratory helium eradicated the consequences of nitrogen narcosis and allowed the divers to work longer and extra effectively.
These early assessments of heliox did reveal one other amusing problem of utilizing the fuel. In addition to giving the divers a humorous voice, the helium within the combine additionally made them extra buoyant within the water, which needed to be compensated for within the combine’s make-up and, in some situations, with extra weights for divers.
