REAL LIFE NEWS: UNDERWATER IRON MAN SUIT HELPS SEARCH FOR ANCIENT TECH
by Hazed
Continuing my trawl through back issues of New Scientist magazine, from a June edition I find a story about a wearable submarine: the world’s most advanced diving suit. It’s being deployed to help search for a very ancient computing device.
The Iron Man-like suit is a rigid metal human-shaped suit with thrusters. It’s called Exosuit, and it will allow divers to operate safely at a depth of 300 metres without having to worry about decompression problems. You can see a picture of the suit at the source link below.
The suit was actually designed for use in New York City’s water treatment plants. (Alligator hunting in the sewers, perhaps?) but now it has undergone tests for use in seawater, to ready it for an attempt to excavate an ancient Roman shipwreck. 100 years ago, divers exploring the vessels off the Greek island of Antikythera in the Aegean sea found a strange device from the wreckage which has fascinated people ever since, and now they are hoping to find a second device by using the Exosuit when they dive down again in September.
The length of time divers wearing scuba gear can spend exploring deep underwater sites is limited because of the dangers of decompression sickness (the bends), so remotely operated submarines are usually used which carry cameras and sonar to scan an area. The Exosuit is basically a “wearable submarine”, diving expert Phil Short explained. “The pressure inside is no different from being in a submarine or in fresh air. We can go straight to the bottom, spend 5 hours there and come straight back to the surface with no decompression.”
Treasures raised from the ship in the past include fragments of a geared device which baffled people until the 1950s, when scholars figured out that the pieces of rusty metal fitted together into a sophisticated device which will predict astronomical events. This early analogue computer was called the Antikythera mechanism. It predates all other computing devices by over 1,000 years. But just like assembling a complicated piece of flatpack furniture, there were some bits left over that didn’t seem to fit, leading researchers to believe there is a second mechanism in the wreck waiting to be discovered.
I look forward to reading about the result of the mission in September, and if it yields interesting finds, I’ll write about it in the Star.
