9 ms·

World's deepest pool to open in Poland

115 points by HillaryBriss 8y ago

irrational 8y ago
It will include a hotel with rooms for a view, but a view for whom? Hopefully the hotel room windows have one-way glass.
- pochamago 8y ago
  Or curtains?
williesleg 8y ago
I saw CNN then decided not to click. Sorry, ycombinator, you won't get my referral bonus to click on that one.
twic 8y ago
> Yet if all goes to plan, Deepspot will not hang on to the accolade for long as an even deeper pool is expected to open in Britain in 2020. Currently being built in Colchester, the Blue Abyss will be 50 meters deep. Smart cost-saving move - Colchester is already a massive hole.
- 100meters 8y ago
  Imagine playing vertical scuba american football in 100 meters of water. I think the end zone would always have to be at the bottom, and with direction of play as a constant, sides would change with possession. Except for punting. Kicking would have to follow the direction that the ball tries to float in.
  - tjohns 8y ago
    Playing a vertical game of football underwater would be very difficult, and likely hazardous. 1. As anyone who's gone diving will attest, you physically can't dive very quickly. You have to constantly equalize your ears as you descend to avoid pain. This would limit how fast you can go down. (Especially at shallower depths, where the effect is more pronounced.) 2. At deeper depths, you'll quickly hit your no-decompression time limits. At 40 meters depth, you only have 8 minutes of no-decompression time. And that's if you don't run out of air first. 3. Recreational diving is usually limited to 130 feet / 40 meters - and that's with extra training. At deeper depths not only does nitrogen have a narcotic effect, but oxygen quickly becomes toxic. A 100 meter dive is well within the realm of technical (not recreational) diving and would require special breathing gas and careful planning. 4. Rapidly going up and down, like you'd need to play a game of football, is recipe for giving yourself the bends. You need to ascend slowly. (And again, that's assuming you haven't exceeded your no-decompression time.) On the other hand, you could play a horizontal game just fine. You're practically weightless underwater (at neutral buoyancy), so the game would be the same the same either way. (For Ender's Game fans: "The enemy's gate is down.")
    - dragonsky67 8y ago
      How about playing football whilst free diving and so avoid the joys of gas bubbles forming. The current free dive depth record is something around 250 meters and people who do free diving spear fishing frequently dive down to 20 - 30 meters. It would change the game somewhat but I could imagine having a ball that was buoyant at about 10 meters would force the play underwater. Having the goals on the bottom either side of a submerged wall would force vertical movement. You would have a challenge with viewing the action, but there are some pretty amazing underwater drones around so I think you could really get with the action.
      - dmurray 8y ago
        Underwater hockey is a start on what you are looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_hockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_hockey
      - danilocesar 8y ago
        Apnea is all about conserving energy, moving as less as you can and as efficient and you can. That said, have you ever watched an apnea competition? When reaching the surface, athletes are required to say "I'm Ok" and do a sign with their hands. Some times they can't do that because they're in a hypoxia state and very close to pass out. it's not a situation you want in a contact sport.
  - throw0101a 8y ago
    > [...] sides would change with possession. Kind of like half-court basketball.
- dgritsko 8y ago
  As someone who is unfamiliar with the area, are you being facetious, or is the natural geography particularly well-suited to building a pool of this sort?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - peteretep 8y ago
    There's two things to understand the comment. In the UK, "a hole" means that a place is bad. I think you could probably translate this into more international English by making a similar pun on "Colchester is already a dive", but it doesn't work quite as smoothly. Secondly, Colchester is a principal part of Essex, which vies with Newcastle for being the UK's New Jersey, but in a worse way than Newcastle. Wikipedia has several articles on the pejorative Essex stereotypes. Colchester also has a major military base, which makes it a center for squaddies[0]. [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=squaddie https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=squaddie
- interfixus 8y ago
  "Massive hole" is going to bug my imagination all day.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I wonder what engineering challenges are involved in this. I'd imagine it's more complicated than just digging a bigger hole and adding more water filters
- gpm 8y ago
  Every 10m of depth adds about 1 atm of pressure. Not sure what challenges specifically that introduces though.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Leaks. Water at those pressures finds holes, opens cracks and eats away at foundations. A little trickle quickly becomes a sinkhole, or your structure starts to float away. It all depends on the soil.
  - abduhl 8y ago
    148 ft of water is ~64 psi (4.4 bar). Challenges are probably not so big once the thing is constructed. External earth and groundwater pressure offsets internal water pressure I would assume and the real challenge is actually designing for when the thing is empty so that it doesn’t fail due to external loads. Lots of this is dependent on geology of the adjacent soil and geometry of the hole. Pictures seem to show sheet piles so we know it’s soil.
orblivion 8y ago
"How low can you?" - the opening sentence of the article as I type. Probably will be corrected soon, but pretty amazing how sloppy copy editing is on one of the largest news sources.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  There's no copy editing anymore, that's something that disappeared around the time on-line news happened...
muloka 8y ago
Cool! Other deep pools are: * Nemo 33 in Brussels, Belgium * Y-40 "The Deep Joy" in Padua, Italy
- dontbenebby 8y ago
  All of these pools are in the EU. As Americans, we cannot allow a deep-pool gap!
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Agreed. I'd love to see one in Texas. We've already got artificial surf parks: https://www.bsrcablepark.com/cable-park/texas-surf-park-bsr-surf-park/ https://www.bsrcablepark.com/cable-park/texas-surf-park-bsr-... Now we just need a good scuba diving park and there's no need to visit the coasts ever again!
    - kwindla 8y ago
      [crocodile dundee accent] That's not an artificial surf park, this is an artificial surf park: http://www.kswaveco.com/ http://www.kswaveco.com/
      - taormina 8y ago
        Wrong time of year, but for the Austin, TX crowd: http://nlandsurfpark.com/ http://nlandsurfpark.com/
      - Grustaf 8y ago
        Yes but how to visit? The website doesn’t even say where it is! Shut up and take my money!
        kwindla 8y ago
        I know, right? For now, you have to know somebody who knows somebody who knows Kelly. :-) Word is that they're going to start opening up reservations for full-day events, sometime this year. Maybe $30k for the day (but that's just a guess). One wave every four minutes. 7 hours in the day. You can bring a dozen friends and surf until your arms (and legs, because the rides can be a full minute long) are noodles. Or you can bring 30 friends and still get eight or ten waves for the day. After being lucky enough to tag along to a group that surfed there last year, I've spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about what my income level would have to be for the $30k to seem like a "reasonable" outlay, once a year. The answer is "a lot lower than is sensible." It's a clean, head-high face, a super-fast down the line wave, and two legit barrel sections. Better than the best waves anywhere on the California coast outside of a handful of days a year. Of course, $30k is just the entry level option. They are starting to think about licensing the plans and tech. For maybe $10M you could build your own! (No idea what it costs to run it per year.)
chungleong 8y ago
It's also the pool with the least pronounceable name. Staring at "Mszczonów", most non-Polish people will just give up, I suspect.
- g_lined 8y ago
  For those who are intellectually curious, this site has two recordings of how to say it: https://forvo.com/word/mszczonów/ https://forvo.com/word/mszczonów/
  - ars 8y ago
    Sounds like Mush-tah-nov to me.
  - Intermernet 8y ago
    Odd, I don't speak Polish, but my mom and grandparents did. Even that small exposure was enough for me to get that pronunciation 100% correct. I wonder what the minimum exposure to any given language is to allow someone to correctly guess pronunciation. I speak a little German and French but regularly get the pronunciation incorrect, but I didn’t grow up around native German and French speakers.
    - Arbalest 8y ago
      It helps a lot to have been exposed to it around 6-12 months. That's apparently when pronunciation subtlety is learnt.
      - Intermernet 8y ago
        Makes sense. My grandmother would sing polish nursery rhymes to me at that age.
    - idlewords 8y ago
      I bet you six meters of kiełbasa that you did not get that pronunciation 100% correct.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Could be an interesting place to train for free diving.
acjohnson55 8y ago
I'm surprised such pools don't already exist. 40m is the limit you can dive without extra training and probably special gas. I guess it must just be really expensive to build and maintain a pool this big.
- lifthrasiir 8y ago
  > I'm surprised such pools don't already exist. As noted in the article, there is already a pool (Y-40) that is 40m deep.
- guiomie 8y ago
  I thought it was 18m (60ft) for PADI open water.
  - zackbloom 8y ago
    That is generally more of a recommendation. The recreational diving limit is generally considered to be 130ft, as that's the depth you can't spend more than a few minutes at without incurring mandatory decompression (breathing air). You can take a deep diving course if you like, but not everyone bothers. Going below 130 though becomes a technical and very complex endeavour quickly.
    - danilocesar 8y ago
      This is almost correct. People imagine that diving training agencies has police power to allow or forbid you to do something. That's not true. When you get a certification, the agency certifies that you have been trained to go to 18m. That's all it does. After the training you can do whatever you want. But if you're not stupid and don't want a quick death or a painful life (wheelchaired due to bends), you will stay within the limits of your training. So it's not only a recommendation, but at the end it works like one.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Looking it up, you're right, and the Advanced Open Water says 30m max. I don't know if it changed or if I just misremembered. I'm pretty sure I did 40m as part of the deep diving segment of Advanced Open Water, but that might not be accurate either. It was about 10 years ago.
dmix 8y ago
China doesn't like not having the biggest of something. I expect this to be beaten within the next couple of years.
pndy 8y ago
There's already small swimming pool complex in Mszczonów city, built on thermal spring source - hence the name Termy Mszczonów. That pool is going to be a part of larger aqua park located 5 km away from Mszczonów, in Wręcza village.
logicallee 8y ago
Near the bottom there's a picture of a different pool, the current largest. A "mermaid" is swimming around without scuba gear. Here is a video I found about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAdSdzAdi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAdSdzAdi0
brlcad 8y ago
The Superpond at APG, Maryland run by the DoD is 46meters (150ft) deep.
- auiya 8y ago
  Closed indefinitely due to deaths in 2013. https://patch.com/maryland/aberdeen/aberdeen-proving-ground-super-pond-closed-indefiniteldd2cbfdefb https://patch.com/maryland/aberdeen/aberdeen-proving-ground-...
  - brlcad 8y ago
    That article is out of date. It’s still operational and in use. Policies changed after three deaths in close succession. Still, the point is that manmade pool exists and has for years contrary to the article.

115 points by HillaryBriss 8y ago

It will include a hotel with rooms for a view, but a view for whom? Hopefully the hotel room windows have one-way glass.

pochamago 8y ago
Or curtains?

williesleg 8y ago

I saw CNN then decided not to click. Sorry, ycombinator, you won't get my referral bonus to click on that one.

twic 8y ago

> Yet if all goes to plan, Deepspot will not hang on to the accolade for long as an even deeper pool is expected to open in Britain in 2020. Currently being built in Colchester, the Blue Abyss will be 50 meters deep. Smart cost-saving move - Colchester is already a massive hole.

100meters 8y ago
Imagine playing vertical scuba american football in 100 meters of water. I think the end zone would always have to be at the bottom, and with direction of play as a constant, sides would change with possession. Except for punting. Kicking would have to follow the direction that the ball tries to float in.
- tjohns 8y ago
  Playing a vertical game of football underwater would be very difficult, and likely hazardous. 1. As anyone who's gone diving will attest, you physically can't dive very quickly. You have to constantly equalize your ears as you descend to avoid pain. This would limit how fast you can go down. (Especially at shallower depths, where the effect is more pronounced.) 2. At deeper depths, you'll quickly hit your no-decompression time limits. At 40 meters depth, you only have 8 minutes of no-decompression time. And that's if you don't run out of air first. 3. Recreational diving is usually limited to 130 feet / 40 meters - and that's with extra training. At deeper depths not only does nitrogen have a narcotic effect, but oxygen quickly becomes toxic. A 100 meter dive is well within the realm of technical (not recreational) diving and would require special breathing gas and careful planning. 4. Rapidly going up and down, like you'd need to play a game of football, is recipe for giving yourself the bends. You need to ascend slowly. (And again, that's assuming you haven't exceeded your no-decompression time.) On the other hand, you could play a horizontal game just fine. You're practically weightless underwater (at neutral buoyancy), so the game would be the same the same either way. (For Ender's Game fans: "The enemy's gate is down.")
  - dragonsky67 8y ago
    How about playing football whilst free diving and so avoid the joys of gas bubbles forming. The current free dive depth record is something around 250 meters and people who do free diving spear fishing frequently dive down to 20 - 30 meters. It would change the game somewhat but I could imagine having a ball that was buoyant at about 10 meters would force the play underwater. Having the goals on the bottom either side of a submerged wall would force vertical movement. You would have a challenge with viewing the action, but there are some pretty amazing underwater drones around so I think you could really get with the action.
    - dmurray 8y ago
      Underwater hockey is a start on what you are looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_hockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_hockey
    - danilocesar 8y ago
      Apnea is all about conserving energy, moving as less as you can and as efficient and you can. That said, have you ever watched an apnea competition? When reaching the surface, athletes are required to say "I'm Ok" and do a sign with their hands. Some times they can't do that because they're in a hypoxia state and very close to pass out. it's not a situation you want in a contact sport.
- throw0101a 8y ago
  > [...] sides would change with possession. Kind of like half-court basketball.
dgritsko 8y ago
As someone who is unfamiliar with the area, are you being facetious, or is the natural geography particularly well-suited to building a pool of this sort?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- peteretep 8y ago
  There's two things to understand the comment. In the UK, "a hole" means that a place is bad. I think you could probably translate this into more international English by making a similar pun on "Colchester is already a dive", but it doesn't work quite as smoothly. Secondly, Colchester is a principal part of Essex, which vies with Newcastle for being the UK's New Jersey, but in a worse way than Newcastle. Wikipedia has several articles on the pejorative Essex stereotypes. Colchester also has a major military base, which makes it a center for squaddies[0]. [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=squaddie https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=squaddie
interfixus 8y ago
"Massive hole" is going to bug my imagination all day.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I wonder what engineering challenges are involved in this. I'd imagine it's more complicated than just digging a bigger hole and adding more water filters

gpm 8y ago
Every 10m of depth adds about 1 atm of pressure. Not sure what challenges specifically that introduces though.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Leaks. Water at those pressures finds holes, opens cracks and eats away at foundations. A little trickle quickly becomes a sinkhole, or your structure starts to float away. It all depends on the soil.
- abduhl 8y ago
  148 ft of water is ~64 psi (4.4 bar). Challenges are probably not so big once the thing is constructed. External earth and groundwater pressure offsets internal water pressure I would assume and the real challenge is actually designing for when the thing is empty so that it doesn’t fail due to external loads. Lots of this is dependent on geology of the adjacent soil and geometry of the hole. Pictures seem to show sheet piles so we know it’s soil.

orblivion 8y ago

"How low can you?" - the opening sentence of the article as I type. Probably will be corrected soon, but pretty amazing how sloppy copy editing is on one of the largest news sources.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
There's no copy editing anymore, that's something that disappeared around the time on-line news happened...

muloka 8y ago

Cool! Other deep pools are: * Nemo 33 in Brussels, Belgium * Y-40 "The Deep Joy" in Padua, Italy

dontbenebby 8y ago
All of these pools are in the EU. As Americans, we cannot allow a deep-pool gap!
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Agreed. I'd love to see one in Texas. We've already got artificial surf parks: https://www.bsrcablepark.com/cable-park/texas-surf-park-bsr-surf-park/ https://www.bsrcablepark.com/cable-park/texas-surf-park-bsr-... Now we just need a good scuba diving park and there's no need to visit the coasts ever again!
  - kwindla 8y ago
    [crocodile dundee accent] That's not an artificial surf park, this is an artificial surf park: http://www.kswaveco.com/ http://www.kswaveco.com/
    - taormina 8y ago
      Wrong time of year, but for the Austin, TX crowd: http://nlandsurfpark.com/ http://nlandsurfpark.com/
    - Grustaf 8y ago
      Yes but how to visit? The website doesn’t even say where it is! Shut up and take my money!
      - kwindla 8y ago
        I know, right? For now, you have to know somebody who knows somebody who knows Kelly. :-) Word is that they're going to start opening up reservations for full-day events, sometime this year. Maybe $30k for the day (but that's just a guess). One wave every four minutes. 7 hours in the day. You can bring a dozen friends and surf until your arms (and legs, because the rides can be a full minute long) are noodles. Or you can bring 30 friends and still get eight or ten waves for the day. After being lucky enough to tag along to a group that surfed there last year, I've spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about what my income level would have to be for the $30k to seem like a "reasonable" outlay, once a year. The answer is "a lot lower than is sensible." It's a clean, head-high face, a super-fast down the line wave, and two legit barrel sections. Better than the best waves anywhere on the California coast outside of a handful of days a year. Of course, $30k is just the entry level option. They are starting to think about licensing the plans and tech. For maybe $10M you could build your own! (No idea what it costs to run it per year.)

chungleong 8y ago

It's also the pool with the least pronounceable name. Staring at "Mszczonów", most non-Polish people will just give up, I suspect.

g_lined 8y ago
For those who are intellectually curious, this site has two recordings of how to say it: https://forvo.com/word/mszczonów/ https://forvo.com/word/mszczonów/
- ars 8y ago
  Sounds like Mush-tah-nov to me.
- Intermernet 8y ago
  Odd, I don't speak Polish, but my mom and grandparents did. Even that small exposure was enough for me to get that pronunciation 100% correct. I wonder what the minimum exposure to any given language is to allow someone to correctly guess pronunciation. I speak a little German and French but regularly get the pronunciation incorrect, but I didn’t grow up around native German and French speakers.
  - Arbalest 8y ago
    It helps a lot to have been exposed to it around 6-12 months. That's apparently when pronunciation subtlety is learnt.
    - Intermernet 8y ago
      Makes sense. My grandmother would sing polish nursery rhymes to me at that age.
  - idlewords 8y ago
    I bet you six meters of kiełbasa that you did not get that pronunciation 100% correct.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Could be an interesting place to train for free diving.

acjohnson55 8y ago

I'm surprised such pools don't already exist. 40m is the limit you can dive without extra training and probably special gas. I guess it must just be really expensive to build and maintain a pool this big.

lifthrasiir 8y ago
> I'm surprised such pools don't already exist. As noted in the article, there is already a pool (Y-40) that is 40m deep.
guiomie 8y ago
I thought it was 18m (60ft) for PADI open water.
- zackbloom 8y ago
  That is generally more of a recommendation. The recreational diving limit is generally considered to be 130ft, as that's the depth you can't spend more than a few minutes at without incurring mandatory decompression (breathing air). You can take a deep diving course if you like, but not everyone bothers. Going below 130 though becomes a technical and very complex endeavour quickly.
  - danilocesar 8y ago
    This is almost correct. People imagine that diving training agencies has police power to allow or forbid you to do something. That's not true. When you get a certification, the agency certifies that you have been trained to go to 18m. That's all it does. After the training you can do whatever you want. But if you're not stupid and don't want a quick death or a painful life (wheelchaired due to bends), you will stay within the limits of your training. So it's not only a recommendation, but at the end it works like one.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Looking it up, you're right, and the Advanced Open Water says 30m max. I don't know if it changed or if I just misremembered. I'm pretty sure I did 40m as part of the deep diving segment of Advanced Open Water, but that might not be accurate either. It was about 10 years ago.

dmix 8y ago

China doesn't like not having the biggest of something. I expect this to be beaten within the next couple of years.

pndy 8y ago

There's already small swimming pool complex in Mszczonów city, built on thermal spring source - hence the name Termy Mszczonów. That pool is going to be a part of larger aqua park located 5 km away from Mszczonów, in Wręcza village.

logicallee 8y ago

Near the bottom there's a picture of a different pool, the current largest. A "mermaid" is swimming around without scuba gear. Here is a video I found about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAdSdzAdi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAdSdzAdi0

brlcad 8y ago

The Superpond at APG, Maryland run by the DoD is 46meters (150ft) deep.

auiya 8y ago
Closed indefinitely due to deaths in 2013. https://patch.com/maryland/aberdeen/aberdeen-proving-ground-super-pond-closed-indefiniteldd2cbfdefb https://patch.com/maryland/aberdeen/aberdeen-proving-ground-...
- brlcad 8y ago
  That article is out of date. It’s still operational and in use. Policies changed after three deaths in close succession. Still, the point is that manmade pool exists and has for years contrary to the article.