I understand that breathable air behaves differently underwater due to higher ambient pressure, and that for some reason it causes bubbles in your blood vessels if you ascend too quickly. But I couldn’t understand why that is.
Additionally, given the same supply of air tank, why is it the case that if you are living in a underwater habitat, then you can dive for longer hours as opposed to someone who came down from the surface?
In: Biology
When you breathe air under pressure nitrogen (the main gas in air) gets dissolved into your blood. As you rise and the pressure reduces that nitrogen comes out of solution and forms gas bubbles. These are bad news. You come up slowly (decompress) to allow the nitrogen to be cleared before it can form big bubbles.
Saturation diving refers to spending long periods under pressure, such that your blood has lots of dissolved nitrogen (or other gases depending on the depth of operation). You would need to spend a long time decompressing, so instead you stay at high pressure inside a tank on the dive boat. At the end of the job you would decompress carefully.
I won’t go into ~~oxygen~~ *nitrogen* narcosis as I don’t know much about it.
Latest Answers