Aren Leishman's Topic:
Topic 1:
High Altitude Fizziology
In this presentation, I will talk briefly about Cousteau setting the world high altitude dive record in 1968, the current world record, and popular altitude dive locations today. I’ll cover some issues specific to high altitude diving (compensation for incorrect depths, etc) then describe my own experiences: instructor course at 5,000 ft in Johannesburg, first diving experiment in Colorado, (in a lake at 10,000 ft), diving with the Bolivian Navy in Lake Titicaca (14,400 ft), and a NASA experiment where I went to 30,300 ft in a hypobaric chamber, which is 2,000 ft higher than Everest. Sweat was literally boiling off my legs as it came out of my pores. Finally, I will conclude by naming four pools and two lakes on earth above 19,400 fsl where no human is thought yet to have dived. Discovery awaits the brave!
Topic 2:
Tech Diving and DAN
The 1970s the oil crisis heightened the US’s need to explore further offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, involving deeper diving, meaning they needed experts on-call for the injuries they anticipated. That’s right, DAN was literally born from deep mixed-gas diving. The founder of DAN, the late Dr Peter Bennett, had a rich history of deep experimental diving, eventually setting a (then) world record 686m trimix dive at Duke University. Since then DAN has kept pace with the growth of tech diving, in the 90’s contributing articles to AquaCorps where the name 'tech diving' was first coined, and sponsoring workshops on the remote management of DCS, Rebreather Forum 3, the Technical Diving Workshop, the PFO workshop and more, most recently publishing a study into caustic cocktail events. This presentation will showcase forty years of DAN’s involvement in the topics that are of high interest to tech divers..
Aren Leishman
Early Career Dive Researcher, Software Engineer
Aren Leishman is an early career researcher completing the Honours year of an Advanced Science degree, on altitude diving tissue pressure modelling. With his background in software engineering he is implementing constant partial pressure and altitude modelling capabilities, used to analyse dives using various decompression models.
He is a CDAA cave diver and trimix CCR diver, and when he isn't diving he can be found tinkering with whatever equipment happens to be on his workbench.
