Dr Peter Buzzacott's Topics:
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..
Dr Peter Buzzacott
Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine Society (UHMS) and the European Undersea and Baromedical Society (EUBS) member, and founding member of the Australasian Wilderness and Expedition Society (AWEMS)
Dr. Peter Buzzacott, MPH, PhD, FUHM is a CDAA advanced cave diver, advanced trimix, CCR diver, and former recreational and technical diving instructor.
He is the former Director of Injury Monitoring and Prevention at Divers Alert Network (DAN) headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, where he examined the root causes of diving incidents, injuries and fatalities. Before that, he conducted decompression experiments at the University of Western Brittany, in France.
His PhD, from the University of Western Australia was on risk factors for diving injuries.
Peter has published more than 70 scientific papers, four edited book chapters and delivered >60 diving science conference presentations in 13 countries.
He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University in Western Australia, and also a DAN Scholar collaborating on a number of DAN Research projects.
