If air is made up of 78% Nitrogen, our blood uses Oxygen and we exhale Carbon dioxide, what happens to nitrogen?
In: Biology
Pure oxygen is unbreathable. We always breath the whole mixture of air that has the basic components. Then our body automatically utilises Oxygen and discards the others.
Nothing, it is inert, unless you go scuba diving and surface to quickly. The excess nitrogen will have issues leaving your body
We exhale oxygen and nitrogen too 🙂 in fact, nitrogen also dissolves in blood, which is why you can get the bends when diving.
So now you know that nitrogen is pretty much inert when we breathe it, but at high pressures it can enter the blood stream, causing us very little harm.
Deep sea divers are subject to such high pressures and therefore their lungs take in some of the nitrogen. When they decompress they must do so gradually so the absorbed nitrogen has time to exit the blood stream via the lungs. If decompression happens to quickly the absorbed nitrogen in the blood will evaporate into air bubbles and kill the diver, a process known as The Benz.
A neat way to combat this is to replace the nitrogen with helium, another inert gas. At high pressure the blood cannot absorb it so the divers don’t need to worry about rapid decompression.
Imagine our bodies are like houses. When we breathe in, we bring in oxygen, which is like the good air we need to live. Our bodies use the oxygen, but we don’t need all of it, so we breathe out the leftover air, which has some carbon dioxide in it. Now, nitrogen is like the air around our house that we don’t use inside. It’s still important, but our bodies don’t need it, so when we breathe, we just leave the nitrogen in the air outside.
I knew this fact & yet upon reading this my brain came up with a scenario where aliens find some poor human astronaut adrift & try to help by giving them nitrogen since that’s the majority of the atmosphere. RIP astronaut.
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