The Science of Skin and Scuba Diving: Adventuring with Safety Under Water

The aim of this book is to present some of the principles governing underwater activity in terms intelligible to the many professional divers concerned about its hazards and acceptable to the multitude of amateur swimmers devoted to it as a sport. The literature of skin and scuba (selfcontained underwater breathing apparatus) diving has become extremely popular, but most of it simply takes advantage of the aura of adventure surrounding the whole subject without seriously tackling the basic facts of physics and physiology. In this book the authors have probably gone as far with such difficult matters as partial pressure, nitrogen narcosis, air embolism, and subaqueous optics as they could without losing the public whom they wish to reach. Their style rarely attains the precision that would be desirable in a textbook, but it has the virtue of concreteness, and the step-by-step methods suggested for acquiring the various techniques are commendably