Scuba Diving Plan Name:
Period:
You are planning a scuba diving trip in the Pacific Ocean, and you are preparing yourself for what you might see on your trip. On the chart below, please fill in what you might expect to see and experience during your dive. The left column is for your guess (make sure to include the deepest depth that you think you will be able to go), and we will fill out the right column as a class. Here a list of some landmarks you may want to include: deepest recorded dive, last living ocean animal, coral reefs, last living organism, and/or the photic zone (this is the zone where enough light passes through water to allow photosynthesis).
Scale is in increments of 1,250 meters instead of 50 meters
Ocean Depth (in meters):
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0-‐ 50-‐ 100-‐ -‐ 200-‐ -‐ -‐ -‐ -‐ -‐ 500-‐ -‐ -‐ -‐ -‐ : 1,000-‐ -‐ 2,500-‐ -‐ 5,000-‐ -‐ 7,500-‐ -‐ 10,000-‐
Your Guesses
Actual Expectations
Use complete sentences to answer the following questions: 1. As a recreational diver, what is the maximum depth that you will be allowed to go? Knowing this, what should you expect to see or experience during your dive (include sea life, temperature, and pressure)? 2. The Sperm whale can dive 7,000 feet (2,100 meters) below the ocean surface to hunt for prey. What adaptations would the whale need to have in order to do this (in other words, how would there body be different than ours or other mammals)?
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Scuba Diving Plan-‐ Teacher Guide After having students make their guesses, use a white board, overhead projector, or large sheet of butcher/poster paper to help students create a table of the real expectations. You may use the following information to guide the discussion: http://largestfastestsmartest.co.uk/deepest-‐living-‐animals-‐in-‐the-‐world/ Dive down into the ocean even a few feet, though, and a noticeable change occurs. You can feel an increase of pressure on your eardrums. This is due to an increase in hydrostatic pressure, the force per unit area exerted by a liquid on an object. Even though we do not feel it, 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi), or 1kg per square cm, of pressure are pushing down on our bodies as we rest at sea level. Our body compensates for this weight by pushing out with the same force. For every 33 feet (10 meters) you go down in the water, the pressure increases by 14.7 psi (1 bar/atmosphere). Pressure chart: 18 meters ~ 3 bars/43 psi 30 meters ~ 4bars/58 psi 60 meters > 7 bars/ 102 psi 200 meters >21 bars/305 psi 2,100 meters > 211 bars/ 3,060 psi 7000 meters >701 bars/ 10,167 psi 11,000 meters > 1101 bars/ 15,968 psi Coral reefs <50m Photic Zone < 200m Temperatures drop below 10° C (50° F)> 700m A whale's lungs can also collapse safely under pressure, which keeps them from rupturing. This allows sperm whales to hunt for giant squid at depths of 7,000 feet (2,100 meters) or more. This is a pressure change of more than 223 atmospheres! (Being big serves a useful purpose when you’re a warm blooded mammal who lives in very cold water. This is because being big helps decrease heat loss -‐ so a big body means a warm body and whales need to keep warm.) Whales also use echolocation to identify objects at deeper and darker depths. The wreck of the RMS Titanic is located about 370 miles (600 km) south-‐southeast of the coast of Newfoundland, lying at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800 m). Deepest octopus – The Dumbo Octopus These charming creatures get their famous Disney name from their paired fins that look like elephant ears. They are the deepest living of all octopuses and have been sighted at depths of 7,000 meters. 3 | P a g e
Deepest living fish – The cusk eel Cusk eels are actually not eels but a group of very bony fish. They live close to the sea bed in temperate and tropical oceans. An 8-‐inch long cusk eel was collected from the Puerto Rico Trench. It was living at the astonishing depth of 29,740 feet (9065 meters)-‐ pretty much the height of Mount Everest -‐ only underwater. The sample was taken from the Challenger Deep, which is nearly 7 miles (11 kilometers) deep. The soil was packed with a unique community of mostly soft-‐walled, singled-‐celled organisms that are thought to resemble some of the world's earliest life forms. A small submarine, the bathyscape Trieste, made it to 10,916 meters (35,813 feet) below sea level in the deepest point in the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, a few hundred miles east of the Philippines. This part of the ocean is 11,034 m (36,200 ft) deep, so it seems that a submarine can make it as deep as it's theoretically possible to go. Trieste was manned by two people and funded by the United States Navy. The pressure sphere used was 2.16 m (6.5 ft) across, with steel walls 12.7 cm (5 inches) thick, able to withstand 1.25 metric tons per cm2 (110 MPa) of pressure. The pressure sphere of Trieste, which weighed 8 metric tons in water, was not neutrally-‐buoyant because the steel had to be so thick for a 2 m-‐sized sphere at that depth to withstand the pressure that it would have sunk like a rock on its own. Therefore Trieste's pressure sphere had to be attached to a series of gasoline floats, accompanied by iron pellets for weight. Deepest Ocean Trench ~ 10,924m Diving Limitations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_diving) Recreational diving: the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) define anything from 18 metres (60 ft) to 30 metres (100 ft) as a "deep dive" (other diving organisations vary) Technical diving: 60 metres (200 ft) may be a "deep dive" Surface supplied diving: 100 metres (330 ft) may be a "deep dive" US Navy diver in Atmospheric Diving System (ADS) suit: 610m
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