ELi5: What causes decompression sickness, and is there such a thing as compression sickness?
In: 41
You’ve got an answer about decompression. Now about compression.
There’s no “compression sickness”, but there’s nitrogen narcosis. With pressure high enough, the nitrogen instead of staying in the blood, passes through cell membranes and disturbs chemical activity of cells – in particular, messing with brain, at first making you feel light-headed, a bit like drunk, and in increased amount making you lose consciousness. That’s why depth divers use special mixes of oxygen with gases other than nitrogen, and need time to adapt – eject the nitrogen from their bloodstream, when descending deep.
It’s also a leading factor of why cave diving is so goddamn dangerous. There’s a bunch of quite darn simple safety rules about cave diving and you’re perfectly safe if you adhere to them all. Except you won’t, because your judgment is impaired, your thought process compromised, you get panicky, you take stupid risks, you make stupid decisions you’d never make normally, and you die.
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