More information on one of our other projects, “One Battery at a Time” can be found here:
and a bit more of the story
Beneath the Looking Glass brings you “the Visibility project”
Beneath the Looking glass was founded by a diver in Seattle, Washington who realized that much of the beautiful marine life she was seeing was in fact living on garbage. It became her goal and that of her dive buddies to help grow awareness via sharing stories, videos and photos of the Puget Sound.
Stormwater is of special interest, because it is a pollutant that every person can help curb. This isn’t ‘big industry’, this isn’t something that we can lobby and tax into submission. This is us. Each and every one of us. We are both the problem and the solution.
The visibility project is a way for divers to become involved in their waterways beyond just taking the proverbial swim through the park, to become citizen scientists and hopefully give back in some small way to something they hold dear.
Visibility is of special interest to divers as it is a measure of how far we can see, which at times is linked to our enjoyment of a dive. It is also very hard for the average diver to ‘quantify’, meaning one persons perceived 20’ may not be another persons. Without an actual measuring device, the report of 15’ visibility may or may not be accurate.
Using the scientific standard of 20cm Secchi disks combined with ambient light meters, and modifying them for horizontal use by divers, we hope to start collecting long term turbidity (visibility) data at a number of different dive sites in puget sound. Some of these dive sites are within a mile of massive storm water outfalls.
It is our hope to document real visibility trends in our waterways, possibly find a correlation between outfall events and visibility divers encounter, and finally to offer access to ‘real time’ visibility data. Divers helping Divers, Divers helping Scientists, Divers helping the environment.
0 comments for “The Visibility Project”