Titanic's sister, Britannic, sank in 1916. Divers have recovered artifacts | Hacker News Reader

Titanic's sister, Britannic, sank in 1916. Divers have recovered artifacts

smithsonianmag.com

67 pointspseudolus22 comments

Britannic has long been one of the major bucket-list dive that many deep wreck sport divers pursue. Diving there require quite a few things to get permission from the owner and the Greek government, among which are a quite heavy fee (and more fees depending on what you are going to do while down there), requirements that each group brings their own licensed doctor that is specialized in diving, and hire a guide. The price tag per diver (not including equipment or travel) that I got from a group who is planning a trip next year put it at around $6k per diver for a 2 week trip, with a plan of total of 4 dives at the wreck. Each dive will have a bottom time (time spent at the wreck) of about 20-30 minutes, and then 3-4 hours of decompression hanging in blue water.

I’m curious how much renting rebreathers instead of tanks would add to the cost?

They do no longer grant permission for open circuit so its mostly a philosophical question. Helium is very expensive currently because of Russia, so it would possible be cheaper to buy a rebreather than do four 100m dives with open circuit.

I do not know many people who would rent a rebreather, as those tend to become fairly personal to the diver when doing that kind of dives, and the required dive training is based on specific brands and units.

    > Helium is very expensive currently because of Russia

It's expensive (in Greece) because the EU added helium to its 14th package of sanctions in September 2024[1].

I'm aware of the ultimate reasons for those sanctions, but it seems weird in this narrow context to say it's "because of Russia". No, it's expensive because of the EU, which decided to make it expensive, unilaterally.

1. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

Technically it expensive because demand exceed supply. Russia was just one of the larger producer, as it is a by product from natural gas extraction, so with the war that source was cut off.

In combination, US military decided to sell a large portion of their stored helium to a single private firm around the same time, rather then sell it off in smaller chunks, and that seems to also have decreased the global supply.

As a semi-new idea people are experimenting with hydrogen as a replacement for helium, which could become much cheaper and renewable compared to helium. Time will tell how bad idea it is to mix high pressure, oxygen and hydrogen while under water.

    > Technically it expensive because demand exceed supply.

How prices are determined in general isn't relevant to your claim that something is "very expensive currently because of X".

    > with the war that source was cut off

What war was going on in August 2024 that wasn't going on in September and October 2024?

I don't see why you're insisting on this passive and inaccurate description.

Someone unfamiliar with this might infer that Russia considered Helium a strategic asset and forbade its export, when the reality is that to the extent that your initial claim is in any way relevant to Helium prices, it's the other way around: The EU forbade the import of Russian helium.

Generally speaking, closed-circuit rebreathers can't be rented.

CCRs are a specialist apparatus, and CCR certification is against a particular model or family of rebreathers – e.g. Buddy Inspiration/Evolution, Kiss Sidekick, Kiss Spirit, etc. Unlike open-circuit scuba certification, there isn't a generic "CCR certification".

Anyone intending (and qualified) to dive to 100m+ on a rebreather will certainly want to do it on their own equipment.

If the $6k is for the whole trip that sounds a deal (ignoring I assume airfare).

Of the fees alone are $6k that’s moderately high but not unreasonable.

> owner

What a strange concept, owner of a shipwreck... But, indeed, TFA links to a Q&A with the British owner who purchased the wreck in 1996:

https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/qa-with-simon-mills-ow...

It's a pretty clever life hack.

If I own a ship on land I have to pay property taxes but if I just sink it to the bottom of the ocean I have people pay me!

Maritime laws just seem overly weird though. If I lost a car in the woods then after 100 years it seems pretty reasonable that any scrapper could take it and salvage what they want ...

You still have to have laws about it, or else I could take your car when it's been sitting in the street for two days.

Throw a corpse in the car first, and you have a reasonable comparison.

> Britannic has long been one of the major bucket-list dive that many deep wreck sport divers pursue.

There were less people non-commercial diving below 100m, than people reaching the top of the everest. If someone has Britannic on his list, then he's ether an extremely talented very serious technical diver with 500+ logged dives or it's just a pipe dream.

For anyone near Belfast I would recommend the titanic experience: https://www.titanicbelfast.com/experiences/the-titanic-exper...

Belfast is a really easy city to get around. The airport is very close to the centre and there are cheap regular flights from the UK.

Fascinating!

In the header image, the interesting gray-bar informational panel placed on the wreck caught my eye. I wonder what it's for?

I assume it's to calibrate scale and color for the underwater photography equipment, but would be interested to learn more from someone who knows for certain.

Yes, looks like ground control points for photogrammetry. https://www.pix4d.com/blog/diving-into-underwater-photogramm...

And why does it have a U. S. National Parks Service logo on it?

It's a photogrammetry scale card made for the National Park Service, probably the Submerged Resources Center which often assists with this kind of stuff.

The NPS has a few different ones for paleontology, underwater archaeology, etc.

Informative answer, thanks.

For some reason I read this as "Tritanic" and "Bitannic" and thought there was a cool series of ships with a mathematical naming convention. Oh well.

As far I understand Brittanic never operated as a luxury cruise ship.

Olympic was the first of this trio, was damaged and retired in 1935 and some artifacts from it is in White Swan Hotel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Swan_Hotel,_Alnwick#Gall...

Man, they were so close to naming the trio Unitanic, Bitanic and Tritanic.

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