ELi5: What causes decompression sickness, and is there such a thing as compression sickness?
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Decompression sickness occurs because of dissolved nitrogen turning back into a gas in your blood as the air pressure outside decreases rapidly causing the soluble nitrogen to form nitrogen bubbles. Think of it the same way a bottle of coke fizzes when u crack the seal the first time. Because the bottle when sealed is in a high pressure environment inside and thus the carbon dioxide gas is all dissolved in the coke.
Well the same is true for being in high pressure emvironements like scuba diving under deep sea. Nitrogen gas in the air becomes more soluble in your blood in this high pressure environment and dissolves in there. Now when you crack the seal of the coke and all the CO2 fizzes, this is because the pressure inside the bottle has suddenly normalised with the air pressure outside the bottle which is much lower and is where CO2 (and nitrogen) normally exist as gasses and thus it bubbles out of the coke, well if a diver was to suddenly raise out of the water over a short period of time, the nitrogen would all suddenly bubble out of there blood like in a coke bottle forming little air bubbles in the blood vessel which is not cool at all.
This is fixed by divers slowly rising up from the deep sea as the slow rise allows nitrogen to gradually become less soluble in the blood and as each lil amount of nitrogen reaches the threshold to become a gas, it is expelled in an exhale by the diver, so by the time they reach the top, they have breathed out nearly all the nitrogen bubbles, as opposed to them all being bubbled out into the blood at once with no where to go
Sorry for the waffle lol
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