A CONTINUOUS DIVE LASTING 32 HOURS
From the water environment up to the deep space out there
As for human unbroken underwater permanence, Francesco Colletta has just beaten his own previous record, stopping the official timing exactly at 32 hours.
Loads of efforts have led to such an extraordinary final result. The feasibility of this Colletta’s record attempt was also due to all those individuals involved in the study, both reliable scuba divers and experienced underwater environment specialists and medical researchers.
NASE® Italian Dept. (V Bianchini) has covered all the technical and logistic aspects of this record try. MARES™, and other sector leader firms, took care of the technological needs, testing both materials and their development projects upon standard products.
The fact is that Colletta did get his new record remaining continuously underwater for 32 hours solely thanks to a Trielastic MARES™ (a semi-dry one piece wetsuit that will be soon commercialized for the very wide number of the world scuba divers), and absolutely standard fittings (as per booties, gloves, fins, and other diving gear as the new X-Vision Liquid Skin mask or the Icon BCD and Abyss regulators that MARES™ has provided and that definitely performed their duty: I mean support and air supply for so a long time).
Nevertheless it is unquestionably with and thanks to Francesco that the mankind can taste a further limit. Thanks to his determination, thanks to his extraordinary control of his own body and, above all, thanks to his innate mental discipline, he succeeded in managing every single minute of his immersion: he organized any activity on his own, both if they were planned ones (as his performing either the complete mapping of a portion of the ground of Plemmirio, a Protected Marine Area, or one of the many underwater meetings with various personages) and even if those activities were simply related to his spare time (as his doing accurate ground explorations, while playing checkers, or when he was availing himself of a GSM ultrasonic underwater communication unit, the “Neptune Space” full face mask by Ocean Reef™, with which he had the possibility to grant some interviews to our national networks. In spite of the very long time of continuous use, that Ocean Reef™ apparatus never pointed out any kind of problem as per the CO and CO2 heaped up, while an outstanding score in ergonomics does absolutely go to its special silicone gasket).Immersion watches Challenger
Without any doubt Colletta revealed himself to be a man of an inexhaustible energy, and an enthusiasm healthy-carrier with the highest virulence for anybody passing by. The most clear evidence of this latter characteristic has been directly witnessed by the group of scuba divers that became available to assist him during the record attempt. Such availability was not merely limited to the presence of those divers in the field selected for such record try and for those sole two planned days but, moreover, it clearly included both that the divers had to practice up to their perfecting delicate operations as the cylinder replacements, and their commitment to attend the planning briefings and the obligation to devote themselves to the many preparations to be performed some days before the record attempt. The group was made of the divers from the Siracusa Free Diving association, and was, Vittorio Bianchini C.O Nase Italy and Franco Montigelli (respectively NASE® Trainer and Instructor).
The assignment was at the same time both a delicate task and a fundamental basis for the real happy ending of such a difficult undertaking that required the fittings replacement for a good 20 times: it means that You had to perform, with their respective checks, the same number of disassembling and reassembling the equipments, and that You had to manage (recharging and checking) more than 20 cylinders for a total amount of 34,000 liters as per air consumption. Time and procedures have been thoroughly monitored so to allow that everything worked at its best and that the athlete had never to face any emergency situation.
Even if unique as per its kind and challenging as per its objective, Francesco Colletta was not satisfied enough with this “simple” record, and upon this record attempt and this sports event he tailored a real scientific project: the Endless Diving project.
The Endless Diving project was generated from the union between Sports and Science, between athletic gesture and scientific research, between sea and space.
As soon as the athlete surfaced it has immediately begun the data processing of the results of those many clinical tests performed. The “mission” is to evict all those pieces of information that can increase the safety during the subaquatic general activities and facilitate a long underwater permanence for professional divers as well.
The assisting team underwent haematological exams before and soon after the event to evaluate the eventual variations as for blood coagulation parameters, as they could have suffered from some inputs due to the prolonged exposure to an extraordinary environment. The Italian Research Council (CNR, Pisa group) registered the EKG parameters, the HR and the body temperature thanks to two permanence probes that took both inguinal and retroauricular temperature every 20’ during the whole record attempt.
An articulated and international scientific project that does count among its many participants even Dudley Crosson, MD from Delta-P Agency of American Space Agency (NASA extravehicular activity). He will receive the final results of those tests performed before and during the 32 hours Francesco Colletta spent underwater; those results are going to be used for the NASA’s “Constellation” program.
Prof. Rossitto [from the “Moon-Base” program at the European Space Agency (ESA)] has measured the athlete’s postural parameters before and after the sports event thanks to a high precision laser instrument. The aim of this kind of study, already widely tested and used with astronauts, was to evaluate the eventual propriocettive physiological variations, that is those changes in the complicated system that allows the human body either to maintain the proper relation with the neighbouring space or to promote the activation of the adequate adjustments through skin and muscle receptors that are continuously informed about the position the body be assuming in the space.
According to what A. Fiorito, MD (Italian Navy) reports, an important aspect of this study will be that one You derived from certain physiological data as the athlete’s water balance, his skin maceration and above all his loss of weight, if any, considering that during all this year the athlete’s preparation included specific supplementation so to reduce the stressful component of this sports event. Overall You can already anticipate that the success of the event will be confirmed by the scientific interest about the athlete as well as You can correctly foresee that the processed data are going to be available for the scientific community within next three months.
The coordinator and study designer of this experimentation Gerardo Bosco, MD PhD says: “As for the study of the human physiology, there has never been a more stimulating historical moment compared to today’s one. Today we can take advantage of centuries of job of all the physiologists of the past. And to this already enriched basis You can even add the many and enormous progresses in the field of the cellular and molecular biology and in the field of the technology, you must only bear in mind the use of long distance data transmission in medicine (image diagnosis, EKG and so on)”.
The Endless Diving project has allowed both a multidiscipline approach to the study of the human modification during the exposure to the underwater extraordinary environment and the research upon proper materials besides the physiological modification that man could face when extreme conditions apply as well as studies upon psychophysical endurance tests.
There are so many scientific implication in that. It’s not just a new gimmick: it is a very serious test that does involve experienced technical professionals and human factor experts; a well designed and professional research that allows to study even prevention techniques for the DeCompression Sickness (DCS) or circadian rhythms alterations (with other further clinical implications, as their usefulness in explaining the aetiogenesis of some physiopathological moments of one’s daily life, bronchitis, emphysema, night apnoeas, cardiovascular pathology).
Endless Diving project:
Side-observer
Vincenzo ZANON, MD DDS CDHMD
ATiP, Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine Unit, Padua, Italy
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