How many total cave dives per year on Earth?

[1atm]

I would think it’s more like 1.5 dives per day. Most divers at or above full cave level likely do only 1 dive per day. For the most part, multiple dives per day will be seen with Cave 1 / apprentice divers.

Also I don’t think the divers per day is a constant through the year, and your yearly average would likely be lower. For example in Mexico, you might hit 16 per day for the popular caves between Nov-Jan, but certainly not June to August, it’s too hot for most. Similar thing is true when you average across the caves, even in high season in Mexico, there are days where you might only see 2-6 divers on a day, or even none.

Overall, my feeling is that your number for total dives per year is too high.

Finally, since you are going after a statistic to gauge how dangerous cave diving is, you probably need to segment it more. There is a substantial difference between a Cave 1 mainline dive with max depth of 6m, and a cold water low viz dive with 6h+ of deco.

Anyhow, all recent studies of this subject that I know of, have yielded the same three conclusions:

• Cave diving overall has become a lot safer since the early days. Back then, lack of training and other basics such as no continuous guideline were primary root causes for fatalities, and divers without cave training were the population with greatest risk.
• Today, the group at highest risk is not the diver without cave training, but actually the recently certified cave diver, esp. those with somewhere between 50 and 150 cave dives. For the trained cave diver primary root causes are often things like depth and gas management
• Deep, challenging, deco cave dives are likely higher risk, but there isnt sufficient data to prove this, in the light of divers undertalking such dives usually have significantly better training/experience and the total number of these dives is very low compared to the rest

You can find analyses along these lines eg in the reports of the NSS-CDS, GUE training materials etc

 

[ofg-1]

IHis methodology is completely standard for making estimates.

Sure, if you just want to make up numbers. Lets make this simple. 20 sites in Florida that see 48 dives per day, 365 days a year? List them.

 

[tursiops]

Sure, if you just want to make up numbers. Lets make this simple. 20 sites in Florida that see 48 dives per day, 365 days a year? List them.

You really are missing the point. He is trying to make an estimate, not quote hard data. How many dive a year do YOU think are made in Florida caves a year? 10? 100? 1000? 10,000? 100,000? 1 million? I'm sure you'll say more than 19, more than 100, more than 1000, but fewer than a million. Ok, you are beginning to make an estimate....which is a guess, sure, but within limits and based on some thinking.

 

[Jay]

In OZ I’m counting 41 based on this Cave Divers Association of Australia - Wikipedia and 5mins of searching ... With a large ‘I haven’t a clue disclaimer’

 

[rjack321]

How many total cave dives per year are there on planet earth? Here is my guesstimate:

About 20 popular caves in Florida, let's say 40 in the Yucatan and another 20 throughout the rest of the world, so 80 total popular dive-able cave systems.

About 16 divers per day doing 3 dives each, so 48 dives per site per day.

Gives 48 X 365 X 80 = 1.4 million cave dives per year on Earth.

Average scuba death rate is 2 per million dives. So we should expect about 2 - 4 cave diving deaths per year if cave diving is assumed to be twice as dangerous as regular diving.

If you know better numbers for these things, would love to hear them. All of the above is baloney off the top of my head.

2 million?
How many cave active divers do you think there actually are?
I would guess worldwide around 4-5,000 active at the most.
Average number of cave dives per dive is way less than 100. Its a skewed population with some doing 200-300+ cave dives/yr but most doing 10-30 cave dives a year.
even with the skew dragging the average up to 100 at a high estimate that's only 500,000 cave dives at the very most. 1/4 your estimate.

There are 2-4 deaths per year, but your denominator is off so cave diving is more risky than OW diving by much larger than a factor of 2

 

[ofg-1]

You really are missing the point. He is trying to make an estimate, not quote hard data. .

In mathematics, what you are referring to is inductive reasoning, a conclusion drawn with no or incomplete data. In engineering, its called a wild ass guess.

 

[tmassey]

This type of thinking is typical for initial order-of-magnitude estimates: Fermi problem - Wikipedia

It can be surprisingly accurate for providing just that: order-of-magnitude initial guesses.

Instead of outrage about the crudity of those initial guesses, anyone got any actual statistics to help refine that obviously-wild-guess? I’m surprised by the lack of hard statistics that have been supplied. You would figure *someone* would have a better answer to a pretty simple question.

Not that I have any...

 

[tursiops]

In mathematics, what you are referring to is inductive reasoning, a conclusion drawn with no or incomplete data. In engineering, its called a wild ass guess.

I guess if you don't know how to make an educated estimate...almost a hypothesis....then you make a wild ass guess. The whole methodology of making an order of magnitude estimate is quite well-developed. I'll bet you do it all the time. What do you call it?

 

[tursiops]

This type of thinking is typical for initial order-of-magnitude estimates: Fermi problem - Wikipedia

Nice link!

 

[1atm]

Instead of outrage about the crudity of those initial guesses, anyone got any actual statistics to help refine that obviously-wild-guess? I’m surprised by the lack of hard statistics that have been supplied. You would figure *someone* would have a better answer to a pretty simple question.

I tried to piece together some numbers from GUE's annual reports. If you connect all the dots in the given data, you'd come to about 100 newly certified Cave 1 divers per year in recent years, earlier years maybe half that. If the numbers in the report are correct and the charts are to scale, then I'm pretty confident in this number. They also state that on average 39% of Cave 1 divers go on to complete Cave 2.

I'll let you make your own guesstimates on how active those divers then are. Some will dive a lot, some a bit, some will probably quit at some point. Key will be the turnover, ie how many quit vs how many new ones start. I will also let you make your own estimate about the market share that GUE has on cave training. Based on these two assumptions you should be able to come up with a decent number for total number of active divers per year.