Saturation Divers Might Have The Craziest Job in The World

I'm not sure if this is a thing where 99% of the world is already very familiar and I just missed the boat on it, or if this is a wildly under appreciated, not nearly talked about enough profession. Last night I was supporting the Chinese economy from my bed by way of scrolling TikTok, and I came across a video of someone working on a ship. The caption read something along the lines "The people working on this ship have the most dangerous job in the world and make $300k per year". 

Then I clicked into the comments, and the top comment said something along the lines of, "Hey asshole, I worked on this ship and nobody I know makes anywhere near that money. The only people who might come even close are saturation divers." So I spent the next 30-90 minutes going down a saturation diving rabbit hole. I thought it was interesting. I figured other people might find it interesting too. 

For those who would rather read than watch a video, in plainest terms, saturation divers work construction deep, deep underwater. Sometimes 1,000 feet deep in the middle of the ocean. They work on bridges, harbors, tunnels. They assemble offshore oil rigs. They do lots of underwater welding. Any deep sea construction, or repairs past a certain depth require a method of diving called saturation diving. These men are down there in the pitch black with nothing but a head lamp. The water whirls around them every time a who-the-hell-knows-what swims past. In my humble opinion, it's scary as shit, and the people who do these jobs don't get nearly enough credit. 

The reason they call it saturation diving is because In order to work at depths that low, you can't just throw on a regular oxygen tank and scuba on down. The only way to survive those depths for as long as these divers need to complete their job is by saturating their blood with different gasses. The air we normally breathe is roughly 80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen. But at those depths, under that much pressure, nitrogen dissolves into your blood. It causes your blood to expand. You'll start to feel drunk. Breathing gets hard. You can get decompression sickness (i.e. the bends) on the way up to the surface. 

In short, if deep sea divers don't saturate their blood they'll probably die. So saturation divers breathe a gas called heliox, which is a mixture of 80% helium, and 20% oxygen. The helium helps the divers think more clearly underwater and shortens the amount of time it takes for them to decompress. It keeps them alive. But still, when returning to the surface, saturation divers have to ascend super slowly so their bodies decompress at a rate that won't kill them. Sometimes returning to the surface can take over a week. So with the amount of work that has to be done, instead of taking the time to decompress after every shift, saturation divers simply don't come to the surface. They just live underwater for extended periods of time. They live in a tiny little Oceangate submarine looking-ass chamber (i.e. diving bell) with multiple other divers for up to months at a time. 

They're just down there living in a tiny little box with a few other dudes. It's where they sleep, eat, piss, shit, everything. The epitome of claustrophobia. But on the bright side, since the divers are breathing 80% helium, they do have the added benefit of sounding like Alvin and The Chipmunks the entire time.

Obviously, the entire operation is dangerous as hell. Saturation divers, on top of getting decompression sickness, risk being electrocuted, suffering hypothermia, drowning, dying from an explosion, etc.. So many things are liable to go wrong. There's one story in particular of a saturation diver named Chris Lemons' who nearly lost his life. There's actually a movie in theaters right now starring Woody Harrelson called "Last Breath" about this very incident. 

Which in hindsight is probably why saturation diving came across my TikTok feed last night. (SPOILER ALERT: scroll past the next three videos if you don't want to know what happens in Last Breath, even though it's a true story and has already happened)

On top of that being the scariest thing that's ever happened to anyone (being detached from your diving bell hundreds of feet below sea level with only a few minutes of emergency air to breath and having zero way to save yourself) the way heliox allowed Chris Lemons to come right back to life with zero brain damage whatsoever after being deprived of oxygen for a full 35 minutes thanks to heliox is fascinating to me. Holy shit. Science, man. The way Lemons' diving partner, despite thinking his friend was surely dead, refused to quit and managed to drag his partner's grown, lifeless body all the way back to the chamber. That's as heroic as it gets. And arguably the craziest part of the whole things… there's footage of the entire incident.

Aside from the movie dramatization that's in theaters now, there's a whole "Last Breath" documentary on the Chris Lemons' story as well.

So that's saturation diving. I didn't know a thing about it until last night. I knew jobs like this existed, but I never knew the details. I find the occupation fascinating. Especially the heliox part. Kinda crazy how we were able to figure that out. Kinda makes you wonder if there are any other situations in which we should be breathing heliox. Or if there are any other weird gas combinations yet to be discovered that would allow you to remain without oxygen for that long and still survive. Or maybe provide other unique benefits. Shoutout to the saturation divers of the world. You do an incredible job. I might have to start looking into more of the craziest jobs in the world. I'm know there are plenty of others out there. Probably other jobs I haven't even considered. But surely saturation diving is up there with the craziest.