By MarEx 2015-09-04 18:43:58

After a two year investigation by the U.K. Maritime & Coastguard Agency (MCA), a commercial diver has been jailed for two years and ordered to pay £35,000 ($53,000) after recovering historic cannons off the U.K. coast. 

Vincent Woolsgrove of Ramsgate, Kent, pleaded guilty to fraud at Southampton Crown Court after he reported to the Receiver of Wreck that he had found and recovered five historic bronze cannons from two different shipwreck sites.

The Department of the Navy (DoN) has issued its final rules on the disposition of sunken military craft including an updated procedure required for research and other activities on these sunken vessels.  Importantly, according to a letter DEMA has received from the DoN, “…activities such as fishing, snorkeling and diving which are not intended to disturb, remove or injure any portion of a sunken military craft are still allowed without the need for a permit.” The revised regulations permitting investigations of sunken military craft under the jurisdiction of the DoN were published in the Federal Register Monday, August 31, 2015. The new regulations won’t officially go into effect until March 1, 2016.

I have heard the analogy about holes in the cheese several times and it pretty much sums up the incident pit.

I’ve been diving rebreathers for quite a while now, teaching them for nearly a decade and I have always been interested in rebreather diver incidents. There are many internet forums with sections dedicated to incidents where the person survived and that person can give a full account of what happened and why. Then there are the other sections of the forums where you read about diver deaths and almost certainly never get any details and a lot is left to supposition.

The reluctance to give known facts on diver fatalities stems from the respect to the families and the diver. The families do not want to read about how their loved one died and also if the diver made mistakes, friends do not want them to appear incompetent. From what I have read, there is almost never a catastrophic incident that takes the diver, it is always a series of events.

An underwater robot has enabled researchers to produce the first detailed, high-resolution 3-D maps of Antarctic sea ice. Scientists from the UK, USA and Australia say the new technology provides accurate ice thickness measurements from areas that were previously too difficult to access.

In undersea exploration, you never know when you might witness a moment of unusual creature interaction

While conducting the an expedition in Puerto Rico, NOAA’s research vessel, Okeanos Explorer, performed exploratory dives with its remotely operated vehicles – Deep Discoverer and Seirios. Scientists from all over were able to watch via telepresence technology direct from their site.