Amazing to know elephant seal and cuviers beaked whale dived so deep.
One additional info that could be included is that of submarines and their depth rating.
The Deep Sea
71–80 of 98 posts
Re: The Deep Sea
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes the lungs are collapsed completely. A seal, as I understand it, has extremely haemoglobin rich blood and stores all its oxygen there for the dive.
I read that some seals can also force air into respiratory cavities in their skull, which keeps them from suffering decompression sickness.
I am not sure how deep they would be able to go with this technique but it might be helpful in shallow water. I mean, to equalise at 20m they would need to generate 2bar (~30psi) of pressure. That is quite a lot! For reference, humans can normally push about 0.1bar (1-2psi) by blowing.. and their sinuses would need to withstand that pressure at the surface, before they dive.
Also, this has nothing to do with decompression sickness (aka 'the bends'). That is to do with dissolved gases in the blood which turn into bubbles when the pressure is lowered.
Re: The Deep Sea
#73Holy moly. The human diving at 332 meters is insane. That’s 34 ata, or 34 times the atmospheric pressure, or 34x compression on your body. Did they use some sort of inverse pressurized suit that can hold this sort of pressure ? I’ve scuba dived to 50m and even that was a bit dizzy for the brain. People have known to hallucinate if they stay deep too long. 330+ meters is absolute nuts. Wow! Someone explain me the scie…
Your body is primarily water so no pressure suit is necessary, but gas narcosis, high pressure neurological syndrome, and oxygen toxicity are all serious issues. You use different breathing mixtures like trimix or heliox to manage them.
Ascending is just as dangerous since you now have highly compressed gas bubbles throughout your body. There are different models you can follow to manage decompression, but it’s far from settled science. Both individual variation and situational factors can affect it greatly.
Re: The Deep Sea
#74Holy moly. The human diving at 332 meters is insane. That’s 34 ata, or 34 times the atmospheric pressure, or 34x compression on your body. Did they use some sort of inverse pressurized suit that can hold this sort of pressure ? I’ve scuba dived to 50m and even that was a bit dizzy for the brain. People have known to hallucinate if they stay deep too long. 330+ meters is absolute nuts. Wow! Someone explain me the scie…
Very broadly, when scuba diving you're breathing gas at the same pressure of the depth at which you are. So the deeper you go, the greater the pressure of the gas that is being dissolved into your tissues. You don't feel this pressure, only the pressure in the body's "hollow" spaces, like sinuses, Eustachian tubes. That's why you need to equalise on the way down.
When you dive to 50m, the feeling of "being dizzy" happens when diving on air. This is due to Nitrogen narcosis. To minimise this, in technical diving, helium is added to the mix, to reduce the percentage of nitrogen and minimise the narcosis.
Going down to 332m, as you correctly say subjects you to a pressure of 34 Bar. To dive this deep you need to be breathing 4% Oxygen, maximum (compared to 21% that is in air we breathe at the surface). At this level, making the mix needs to be extremely precise and you need to be sure your instruments are properly calibrated, as a 5% mix can potentially kill you at that depth.
Re: The Deep Sea
#75Wow I felt increasing anxiety / claustrophobia as I scrolled deeper and deeper. I can’t imagine what it was like for those two in that tiny sub. A mix of that and elation/excitement at pushing the frontier of man forward
Re: The Deep Sea
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read that some seals can also force air into respiratory cavities in their skull, which keeps them from suffering decompression sickness.
I am not sure how deep they would be able to go with this technique but it might be helpful in shallow water. I mean, to equalise at 20m they would need to generate 2bar (~30psi) of pressure. That is quite a lot! For reference, humans can normally push about 0.1bar (1-2psi) by blowing.. and their sinuses would need to withstand that pressure at the surface, before they dive. Also, this has nothing to do with decompre…
>Also, this has nothing to do with decompression sickness (aka 'the bends'). That is to do with dissolved gases in the blood which turn into bubbles when the pressure is lowered.
Dissolved gases dropping out of solution and forming bubbles is literally decompression sickness.
Re: The Deep Sea
#77Wow I felt increasing anxiety / claustrophobia as I scrolled deeper and deeper. I can’t imagine what it was like for those two in that tiny sub. A mix of that and elation/excitement at pushing the frontier of man forward
Re: The Deep Sea
#78I wonder what prevents a fish that goes down to 100 meters from going down to 300 meters or 3000 meters. Does it feel an internal pressure that tells it to not dive further, or is it the amount of light or availability of food it seeks? Since fish wouldn't suffer from decompression sickness, I wonder if they could dive much deeper if they wanted to. Now that I think about it, I've scuba dived to 130 feet and it didn'…
This is because you are artificially pressurized by the air you're breathing when scuba diving that deep. If you held your breath and went that deep, you would definitely feel the pressure.
I think you can already feel that pressure when holding your breath and diving just 3m deep.
Re: The Deep Sea
#79If you enjoyed this and also like playing games, treat yourself with Subnautica. It‘s very good at giving you the feeling of how I would think it would feel to have to survive on an ocean covered planet, including diving into the depths.
Re: The Deep Sea
#80This really goes to show you how far species we normally think of as living mostly near the surface will go in search of a meal.