Deeper into Diving Comprehensive Second Edition

If there is a single technical book for serious divers, Deeper into Diving, 2nd edition, is it. It’s been fifteen years since John Lippman produced his groundbreaking first edition and what we know about diving has changed significantly. Lippman, now teaming up with Dr. Simon Mitchell, has again produced the seminal work for serious divers.

At 512 pages and $65, Deeper into Diving discusses almost all there is to know about decompression procedures (U.S. Navy, Huggins, Bassett, NAUI, PADI RDP, Büehlmann, DCIEM, and the BSAC tables as well as dive computers and their various algorithms). The authors bring together a wide range of technical information, not easily obtainable elsewhere. There are chapters on diving physiology and various physical and medical aspects of deeper diving, including narcosis, carbon dioxide, heat loss, decompression sickness, multilevel diving. And plenty of medical information about women’s health, pregnancy, bone necrosis, hypothermia and the interaction of drugs with the diving environment.

Lippmann, the Executive Director of Divers Alert Network S.E. Asia-Pacific, has been researching, teaching, writing and consulting on safe diving, decompression and deep diving for the past 30 years. Mitchell, a hyperbaric medical physician, is an active technical diver and has logged more than 6,000 sport, scientific, commercial, and military dives. But Deeper into Diving is not exactly a lightweight liveaboard read. It’s written for experienced recreational and tech divers, as well as instructors and medical professionals. Dr. Richard E. Moon, a senior consultant to DAN, finds the new edition, “comprehensive enough to appeal not only to advanced recreational divers and instructors, but also to those who want to learn about decompression tables and technical diving.”

The technical explanations can be exhaustive — and exhausting. For instance, the authors take four pages to describe the often undetected heart condition Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO), which seems to make divers more susceptible to decompression sickness, especially when they are within their computer limits. Essentially a birth defect found in as much as 30 percent of the population, most divers would never know they had a PFO until they got bent, and then they may never know unless they are diagnosed with an echocardiogram, an ultrasound test.

Order the book by going to our home page at Undercurrent. When you order, indicate in the comment space that Undercurrent sent you, and the publisher, Aqua Quest, will donate 15 percent of your total purchase to projects that work to conserve reefs in Fiji and Belize.