He happily left the Washington, DC area for the new NOAA EDU, which was housed at the U.S. Wells achieved his career-long ambition of creating the NOAA Experimental Diving Unit (EDU). When the NOAA Diving Program was created in 1978, he was appointed director, maintaining his duties as NOAA Diving Coordinator and assuming the administrative duties of the Director. In 1975 he was appointed NOAA Diving Coordinator, where he was responsible for all aspects of NOAA’s diving training, safety, and effectiveness. His duties included coordinating and conducting undersea research with scientists from around the globe. Wells served as science coordinator from 1972 until 1975. Starting in 1971, NOAA Diving was overseen by the Manned Undersea Science and Technology Office, where Dr. Wells began working at NOAA soon after NOAA was established in 1970. Wells also served as operations director for special missions of HYDROLAB and HELGOLAND (in U.S. In addition to Sealab, he also dove inside TEKTITE, EDALHAB, HYDROLAB, PRINUL, HELGOLAND (Germany), and LORA (Canadian, under ice). Later that year, he served as a Sealab II Aquanaut during a 15-day, 205 foot helium/oxygen saturation dive, beginning a 30-year career in undersea habitat diving. Navy Sealab Aquanaut for their “Man in the Sea” project and later received mixed gas and rebreather training at the US Navy Mine Defense Lab in Panama City, Florida. He received scientific diving training at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California) in 1962 while receiving his Ph.D. Morgan Wells (right) during his years at Sealab. When compressed air became available in his area, he switched to open circuit air diving and earned money teaching SCUBA diving while in college.ĭr. By 17, he was writing letters to the Navy to alert them of technical errors in the Navy Diving Manual. He used that unit for several years to dive in the ocean, rivers, lakes and under the ice. A year later, Wells built an oxygen rebreather from surplus aircraft respirator parts by looking at diagrams in the U.S. He began diving at the age of 14, after making his own surface-supplied diving system out of a paint sprayer and a motor-scooter engine. Wells was employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 1972 until his retirement in 1995 and produced some of his most significant discoveries and accomplishments while working at NOAA, his love for diving and passion for the physics and mechanics of diving were evident very early in his life. Wells has been credited with having spent more time living on the ocean floor as an aquanaut, and having lived in more habitats than any diver on the planet.Īlthough Dr.
Aside from his breakthroughs in breathing gas mixtures, he was also known for conducting research in undersea habitats, where people, known as aquanauts, can live for extended periods of time. He later developed NOAA Trimix I, a mixture of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen used in deep diving. Thanks to his research and testing efforts, these mixtures are now widely used in the scientific and recreational diving communities. Wells was best known for developing the NOAA Nitrox I (32% O2/N2) and II (36% O2/N2) mixtures and their respective decompression tables in the late 1970s.
Morgan Wells (right) gets ready for a surface supplied dive using the Mark 12 helmet in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.ĭr.
0 kommentar(er)
