Reg Sprigg builds a dive chamber in 1960s to confirm his deep-sea canyons off Kangaroo Island, South Australia
The diving chamber built for Reg Sprigg (top right) to confirm his deep-sea canyons find. The chamber was displayed at Adelphi Terrace in Adelaide’s Glenelg North, after being restored by diving enthusiasts including Richard Harris (bottom right) the Australian of the Year 2018 for his part in the Thai boys’ cave rescue.
Richard Harris image courtesy ABC (Australian Broadcasting News), Adelaide.
South Australia’s greatest innovator Reg Sprigg – geologist, explorer, environmentalist and a founder of South Australia's oil and gas industry – also led studies of the ocean floor that were the first of their kind in Australia. South of South Australia’s Kangaroo Island,
Sprigg discovered some of the deepest undersea canyons, about the size of the Grand Canyon in the United States of America. One of the largest of those undersea canyons was named after Sprigg in 1947 when, to prove his hypothesis that the Murray River had offshore submarine extensions, he used the presence of the Australian Navy in 1947 to obtain deep sea soundings. The sounding detected the Murray submarine canyons.
To confirm his deep-sea canyon discoveries in the 1960s, Sprigg took up scuba diving when it was still fairly new activity and built his own oceanographic vessel, Saori, that operated widely across the southern continental shelf and into New Zealand waters in sea-bottom geological exploration. Sprigg also had his company GeoSurveys build his own diving chamber for him to make more than 500 dives across more than 3000 square kilometres, reaching depths of more than 50 metres.
After Sprigg’s death, his diving chamber was left to deteriorate in the heat 600 kilometres from the sea and north of Adelaide at Arkaroola where he had started his eco-tourism resort in the northern Flinders Ranges. In 2012, a group of South Australian divers, led by Dr Richard Harris from the diving and hyperbaric medicine unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and Ken Smith, with volunteers including Bob Ramsey and Peter Costello, restored the chamber over four years.
In 2016, the restored chamber was brought south and placed at Adelphi Terrace in the Adelaide seaside suburb of Glenelg North, near the Patawalonga and where Sprigg lived at Somerton Park. (Richard Harris went on to his own international diving fame as Australian of the Year 2018 for his part in the Thai boys’ cave rescue.)
Sprigg contributed a stunning list of firsts to scientific knowledge. He discovered the oldest fossils in the world: the 500-million-year-old Ediacaran fossils from the-then underwater Flinders Ranges area . He was among the first to theorise about climate change. In 1948 he formed a theory – rejected by the International Geological Congress in London - that sand dunes at Beachport and Robe in South Australia's south-east came from sea level changes and glacial melting.
Sprigg was the first person to propose a theory about the geological formation of Adelaide's landscape due to movement under the earth's crust – before plate tectonics were known or accepted science.
