DANGERS FACED BY DIVERS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27193, 10 November 1953, Page 9

DANGERS FACED BY DIVERS

HAZARDS MET IN DEEP-SEA WORK a Reuter Correspondent.) WASHINGTON. Deep-sea diving has its perils, but modern practitioners 4 of an art at which man steadily grows more proficient have concluded that the monsters of the deep so feared in an earlier age are the least of the dangers, said a recent National Geographic Society bulletin.

Sharks and barracudas, it has now been reliably established, seldom if ever attack swimmers except when they are near the surface and thus appear to be some sort of disabled fish. Even large octopi retreat from a man moving purposefully over the sea bottom, the bulletin said.

Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, French leader of the National Geographic Society-Calypso expedition recovering a 2000-year-old GrecoRoman cargo vessel from the bottom of the Mediterranean, recently reported 4hat his free-swimming divers had met octopi of respectable size. The grotesque creatures fled in terror. Perhaps the largest octopus yet met beneath the water was one with eyes “the size of saucers” seen by a reputable adi ver off Piraeus, Greece. The man admitted he was frightened, but said the animal beat him to the retreat.

A British diver working in Japanese waters owned up to “annoyance” with octopi. Small individuals clustered so thickly on his suit that he could not see through the helmet eyepieefes. The bulletin said there may be huge creatures at depths to which men have not yet gone that will prove dangerous. No diver, for example has yet met a giant squid face to face. Weighing up to 30 tons, this carnivorous beast lives normally at depths greater than the 540 feet thus far attained by any suited diver. Like other squid, the giant has 10 arms to the eight of its relative, the octopus. . Not the denizens, but the attributes of the sea are the diver’s worst enemies. Pressure or its after-effects can kill or cripple him. Air must be efficiently furnished him below lest he suffocate and even the air’s ingredients—oxygen and nitrogen—will poison him unless mixed in proportions that differ both from the earth’s atmosphere, and for each depth attained.