Chris Lemons - Reasoning with Life and Death on the Bottom of the North Sea

In September of 2012, a freak failure of the dynamic positioning system of the vessel Chris Lemons was working beneath resulted in his umbilical - which provides him with breathing gas, light and heat - being completely severed. He was left on the seabed in complete darkness 300 feet below the surface, with only the 5 minutes of breathing gas he carried in the emergency tanks on his back and no way to protect himself from the freezing temperatures. It took his heroic rescuers over 40 minutes to come back and fetch him, and his miraculous survival story has baffled experts ever since. His extraordinary story was subsequently immortalized in the hit Netflix/BBC documentary Last Breath, and is currently being given the Hollywood treatment in a remake starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu and Finn Cole. In this talk, Chris will offer insight into the relatively unknown world of saturation diving, where those involved spend weeks on end confined to a compression chamber, whilst being lowered each day in a diving bell to the murky depths of the ocean floor to do their work. He will also take us through the events of that fateful day in 2012, when he defied all odds and survived his brush with death. Presentation has been abridged at the request of Chris. If you would like to contact him to present at your own institution, be sure to visit his website here: https://www.chrislemons.co.uk/