UTD Essentials of Scientific Diving at
the Seattle Aquarium
The Seattle Aquarium is rolling out a new scientific diving training program
for our staff and volunteers. This new class teaches the disciplines and practices of scientific diving, but also expands and refines the divers’ skills to a
higher level of awareness and safety. The core of this training is the Essentials
of Scientific Diving (ESD) developed in partnership with Unified Team Diving.
In 2011 we began the training with UTD for staff divers. UTD co-founder Jeff
Seckendorf and local UTD Instructors Brian Wiederspan and Jeanna Edgerton
trained the first two classes of aquarium staff in the Essentials of Recreational
Diving. At the same time aquarium dive safety officers, Jeff Christiansen and
Joel Hollander, began their UTD instructor development class while the new
ESD curriculum was being authored. The aquarium has since trained most of
the staff in Essentials of Scientific Diving.
UTD’s approach of unified, consistent, scalable and interchangeable systems to
enable seamless “mixed” team diving has prompted sweeping changes in our
diving practices. The result has been a dramatic increase in task productivity
with a commensurate ‘raising of the bar’ in dive safety. The building block
teaching methodology that defines: core principles, equipment configuration,
in-water skills and methodology and diving practices has integrated well into
the aquarium’s training program and has made learning these new techniques
fun.
We began offering this training program to our volunteer divers in 2013. Some
of them have even quick-started their learning process by getting UTD Essentials training through Brian and Jeanna. They then only have to complete
the balance of their scientific academic and dive training to become Seattle
Aquarium Scientific Divers.
Conservation awareness in the Pacific Northwest dive community is strong;
local divers are seeking ways to contribute to efforts to document and understand our aquatic ecosystems.
Introducing the aquarium’s one
hundred twenty volunteer divers
to UTD’s Essentials of Scientific
Diving course gives them the
tools they need to make meaningful contributions to research
done by the Seattle Aquarium,
in addition to educational and
research institutions and citizen
science organizations throughout
the region.
Jeff Christiansen, UTD Instructor
Brian Wiederspan teaching at the Seattle Aquaium.
P\hotos by Scott Lundy.