So for most diving like 100 ft you breath normal compressed air but as you go farther down and for longer they start replacing nitrogen with helium or in shallow water like 30 ft they replace it with oxygen gas. Why not just use normal air for everything?
In: Biology
The deeper you go, the higher pressure the gas needs to be. Up to about 100′ (more like 130′) nitrogen is annoying but not dangerous…you just have to deal with decompression.
However, as the nitrogen pressure starts going up you start to be exposed to narcotic effects of nitrogen, called nitrogen narcosis. You also start to get issues with oxygen toxicity. And decompression to remove dissolved nitrogen becomes a bigger and bigger issue. To counteract all that, deeper gases are made up of mixtures that won’t poison you, put you on a trip, and can be decompressed more easily.
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