Pioneering dive researcher Karl Huggins celebrates 30 years with Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber
Scuba diving is a pursuit with extreme tradeoffs. On the one hand, it gives divers access to a mesmerizing world unlike anything we can experience above the surface. But precisely because the underwater world is so different from land, diving also comes with tremendous risks.
That’s where Karl Huggins, director of the USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber, enters the picture. Thirty years ago this month, he moved to Catalina Island to oversee the chamber, an emergency medical facility that treats diving injuries from throughout the Southern California Bight. Located on the waterfront at the Wrigley Marine Science Center (WMSC), the chamber serves the Southern California diving community as part of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies.
Though Huggins and a crew of volunteers see divers experiencing a range of issues, the chamber itself exists to treat decompression sickness and air embolism. Decompression sickness, commonly called “the bends,” occurs when divers ascend too quickly from the high-pressure world of deep water. The rapid pressure change between diving depth and the surface can cause nitrogen to bubble out of solution in the bloodstream, causing tissue damage, reducing blood flow, and sometimes causing serious neurological complications. To treat patients, staff put them in the massive steel chamber, increase the air pressure, and then slowly return it to surface levels while delivering concentrated oxygen to the patient.
“Safe diving is essential to our study of the natural world and to finding solutions for environmental and sustainability problems. The Wrigley Institute’s efforts in those areas are more effective because Karl is part of our team,” says Wrigley Institute Director Dr. Joe Árvai. “His remarkable depth of diving knowledge, his reassuring demeanor, his sense of humor, and his dedication to the field of diving have made him a uniquely valuable member of our community.”
Once you know Huggins’s story, his work with the chamber seems like the natural culmination of his career. It all started in Michigan, where Huggins grew up swimming, snorkeling, and canoeing along the Great Lakes. He was captivated by Jacques Cousteau’s early films about undersea life, and stints as a lifeguard and competitive swimmer only confirmed his love of the water.
In high school, while working as a lifeguard, Huggins experienced two events that set the course of his future. One day, a swimmer suffered a massive heart attack in the pool. Huggins and his friends tried to save the man, but they didn’t succeed. Around the same time, Huggins found an old diving mask and compressor at the pool and tried it out (“If I knew then what I know now, I would never have gone down in that thing,” he says with a laugh). Together, those experiences confirmed his desire both to be a diver and to help save lives.
In college, Huggins found a way to bring the two interests together. Enrolling at the University of Michigan to study biological oceanography, he met diving physiology expert Dr. Lee Somers and became interested in how the human body responds to decompression. The diving community at the time was split on how to calculate a safe dive time and ascent process. Most diving instructors told students to plan based on a dive’s lowest depth. This extremely conservative approach was safe but resulted in dives being shorter than many people thought necessary. The U.S. Navy provided more nuanced guidance in the form of profiles that accounted for a variety of factors, including the decompression response of six different theoretical tissue types (called “compartments”). Navy model-based methods allowed for longer dives, but the required calculations were so complex that they were almost unworkable for the average diver. “Multi-level” divers tried to split the difference, calculating safe time underwater based on varying depths but accounting for only one compartment type. Like the Navy model, multi-level diving allowed for more time underwater, but it put divers at greater risk for decompression sickness. Huggins wondered: could he solve the problem by coming up with a set of tables that were simple to use, like the multi-level method, but as safe as the Navy standards?
The answer, as it turns out, was a resounding “yes.” Huggins learned of research by Dr. Merrill Spencer, who used Doppler ultrasound to “listen to” nitrogen bubbles in the bodies of both healthy divers and those suffering from decompression sickness. Spencer’s insights helped Huggins develop a new set of tables, published by the University of Michigan’s Sea Grant office, that accomplished his goal of making diving both more accessible and safer. The tables are still in use as a reference tool today.
But the impact of Huggins’s research doesn’t end there. Going on to graduate school, he met divemaster Craig Barshinger at a scuba instructor training in Ohio. Barshinger wanted to build a portable dive computer to further simplify time-and-depth planning, but he didn’t have as much background in decompression modeling. He approached Huggins regarding collaboration on the project. After a period of back-and-forth, Huggins agreed to join Barshinger and his business partner Jim Fulton in their project. Together, the three of them spent several years developing and testing what eventually became Electronic Dive GuidE, or EDGE: the first commercially viable dive computer whose calculations were based not on dive tables, but on an algorithm that approximated the human body’s response to dive profiles. The team’s rigorous testing process made EDGE more durable, reliable, and accurate than competing models.
EDGE’s lasting legacy for Huggins, however, has proved to be his connection with the Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber. In 1983, he visited Catalina to run human subject tests for the EDGE, and he occasionally taught classes at the chamber after that. When the director decided to retire in 1992, he remembered Huggins and encouraged him to apply for the position.
Huggins didn’t come to Catalina intending to stay this long, but he’s glad he has. In addition to saving lives, as he has wanted to do ever since middle school, he’s been able to share the joy of scientific diving with countless USC students. He is also a longtime mentor for Our World Underwater, an annual program that funds experiential learning for students interested in underwater careers, and often serves as host and resource for WMSC visitors from NASA, The U.S. Coast Guard, and more. And of course, a Catalina home base is the perfect spot from which to continue his diving adventures – though you’re just as likely to find him hiking through the hills, capturing photos of the island’s unique wildlife.
Thinking back to the life-changing decision he made 30 years ago, Huggins is characteristically low-key. “I remembered the people on Catalina, I knew the facility, and I liked what it stood for,” he says. “I thought, ‘That was a nice place, I could go for that’.”
