Dive Gear, Scuba Diving Classes, and Certification

Water… Seventy eight percent of our earth is covered in it. We need it to survive, but we cannot breathe it. And since times long past we have been fascinated by it. The beauty of the sea has been captured in fiction, poetry, and other literature since the time of the ancient Greeks.
What captivates us about the ocean is twofold, its beauty and its mystery. After all, everyone knows that there is life beneath the surface of the ocean, and one can only wonder “what is really down there?” The answer to that question has been the life’s work of many individuals.

The first attempts at underwater exploration were done via unassisted diving. A diver would hold their breath, take the plunge, and swim around under the water until they needed to resurface for more air. For shallow areas near the shore, this worked reasonably well. However it fell short when one wanted to spend an extended period looking at things underwater.

The next attempts at underwater exploration featured two important advancements. First, snorkeling was invented. Using a reed, a person could keep their head under the water while still being able to breathe the air above. The second was the addition of diving bells. When a bowl is set mouth down into the water, the air within it becomes trapped. This was used by the ancients to lower bubbles of air from a ship off shore. A diver could swim down, and use the diving bell as a sort of base and breathing station, greatly extending their ability to explore the depths.

These two inventions are examples of surface assisted underwater breathing. The name pretty much says it all. With systems that utilize it, air is brought from the surface down to a diver. This was the first type of air assisted diving done. It was not until centuries late that SCUBA or self contained underwater breathing apparatus; was invented. In scuba diving you pack your own air around with you, freeing you of the need to be tethered to the ship while underwater.

In scuba diving you have the tanks, which are not actually air at all. You see air is a mixture of free floating gasses that are found in consistent proportion to one another pretty much anywhere on earth. A diver’s tank however is filled with specific gasses that are mixed and added under pressure to the tank. The most common form of dive mix is nitrogen and oxygen. While these two gasses make up a large portion of the earth’s atmosphere, the ones found in a diver’s tanks were elementally pure lab gasses, rather than the mix of ions, molecules, and mixtures found in nature. Always make sure you have up to date scuba gear and equipment.

There are other diving mixes used for specific purposes, such as deep sea diving. To use these gasses, you need to be a professionally certified diver. For any diving, it is highly recommended that you obtain a diving certification.
They are not difficult to obtain. You simply attend some diver’s training classes, and pass an oral and written exam.
These certifications can be had from just about any state, even those such as Utah, Arizona, and Nevada that don’t sport many in-state diving attractions!

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