The Clearance Diving Branch is the specialist diving unit of the Royal Australian Navy whose versatile role covers all spheres of military diving, and includes explosive ordnance disposal and maritime
Clearance Diving Branch Badge
Inspecting clandestine naval mines in the Persian Gulf, 2003.
Clearance Diver preparing to conduct a maritime tactical operations dive using Divex Shadow Excursion rebreather during Exercise RIMPAC 2016 in Southern California
Clearance Divers prepare to enter the water during a Very Shallow Water (VSW) scenario during Exercise Tricrab 2016 in Guam
Clearance diver
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A clearance diver was originally a specialist naval diver who used explosives underwater to remove obstructions to make harbours and shipping channels safe to navigate, but the term "clearance diver"
Clearance Diving Branch (RAN)
…disposal, to include a special operations focus. The RAN has used divers on a regular basis since the 1920s, but it was not until World War II that clearance diving operations came to the fore, with RAN divers working alongside Royal Navy divers to remove naval mines from British waters, and from the waters of…
A US Navy work diver is lowered to the sea bed during a dive from the USNS Grasp (T-ARS-51) off the coast of St. Kitts.
Preparing to raise a mine from the seabed
US Navy explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) divers
Lionel 'Buster' Crabb, using the DSEA at Gibraltar, April 1944.