What is safer overall, recreational diving or snowmobiling??

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In Australia, snowmobiling would definitely be safer. Why? I am pretty sure that there is no place a lay person could legally ride a snowmobile.
 
iffn ya be an eejut ya can keel yaself walkin cross a road. A Scuba kit or a snowmobile aint dangerous.Its the eejut that uses em that makes em dangerous.
 
5 snowboarders were killed in an avalanche yesterday in Colorado.

This points out that a lot depends upon the kind of snowmobiling you are doing. The OP limited the diving to relatively shallow, benign diving. There is a big difference between snowmobiling across a big, wide open field and snowmobiling across an avalanche zone above timberline near the continental divide. The 5 snowboarders who were killed a few days ago were expert snowboarders participating in an event which is, ironically, partially designed to stress back country safety. It was a huge slide, and there was nothing they could have done any differently to save themselves--except not go there at all. They had all the skills. They had all the equipment. And yes, snowmobilers in Colorado go to such places as well.

I know someone who was also snowmobiling in unfamiliar terrain high in the Colorado Rockies. He went through a stand of trees and realized he had just gone off a cliff with a 50 foot drop. He lived, but he was a mass of broken bones.
 
In Australia, snowmobiling would definitely be safer. Why? I am pretty sure that there is no place a lay person could legally ride a snowmobile.

Well all the good ski spots are in the national park, but there must be plenty of private farmland that's above the snowline in winter. No idea where you'd even find a snowmobile in Australia although I understand emergency services around Thredbo have a few. Riding dirt bikes in the snow seems more likely. Why let a rare day of snowfall spoil an afternoon's hoonery?
 
Snowmobiling, snowboarding, snow skiing, snowperson making,... All the the same. Just crazy pastimes for those Canucks waiting for their 2 months of summer to show up.

corrected :D
 

I don't think this accurately compares the two. Where I live, there are easily 1000 times more snowmobilers than divers, and they go on hundreds of rides per year while the average diver in my area does less than 50 dives per year. In Florida, the opposite is probably true.

I am not saying one is more dangerous than the other, just that you cannot infer it from this data.

Incidentally, I have never seen a snowmobiler die from DCS.
 
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