It doesn’t actually cause humans to get crushed “like empty cans of of soda” right?
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Usually, no, you don’t get crushed. Think of water pressure as like air pressure. There’s a tremendous amount of air pressure surrounding us at any given time. But we are not crushed by the weight of the atmosphere because the atmosphere supports itself–the weight of the gases above us are supported by the gases around us. The same is true in the water. It’s not going to have any appreciable crushing effect until you’re *extremely* deep.
The main consideration is that gases compress under pressure, unlike liquids and solids. And we have lots of gases in our body–not just in our lungs, but also throughout all of our tissues and blood. So you need to keep your volume of gases at about the same regardless of pressure, or you’ll have problems. When you dive down, all of the gases in your body are compressed by the pressure and get smaller. This causes no problems in your blood, but it does cause problems in your lungs because your lungs need a minimum volume to keep from collapsing, and diving will quickly compress your lung air to be too small of a volume. Likewise you’ve probably noticed ear pain when diving because the gas in your ears compresses, creating a relative vacuum in your ear, which is painful. So that’s why you need to equalize ear pressure (add gas) and you need to use SCUBA, which feeds you gases that are pressurized to whatever your depth is, keeping your lungs inflated. You have the opposite problem on ascent–the air in your lungs and ears and blood expands. It will rip a hole in your lungs and kill you unless you are careful to exhale as you ascend. Ears are usually fine because the ear drums will usually open naturally to let the excess pressure out. But the blood gases are a real problem–the decrease in pressure causes the gases dissolved microscopically in your blood to expand and cause bubbles to form in your blood and tissues, which causes damage and death unless you decompress by slowly ascending to allow time for the excess gases to be removed from your body via traveling through your blood stream and being exhaled through the lungs.
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