Suruthi

You're absolutely fine.

However...

At depth, that gas that you breathe in stays inside your body.

And as the atmospheres we experience increase, so as you go further deeper into the water and basically due to the crushing weight of the water, it becomes hard and harder for your body to expel this gas.

So it stays in your bloodstream.

And in particular, nitrogen builds up in the blood vessels.

And this is because the high pressure compresses molecules of gaseous nitrogen and causes it to be dissolved into the bloodstream.

So the deeper you go and the longer you stay down there, the more nitrogen gets dissolved into your bloodstream.

Which is just such like, it just sounds like such a horrific olden timey thing.

I know it's not just like a disease anyone catches, like your very specific circumstances, but it's just so like, yeah.

So then in the 40s, researchers realized, and this is a very, very important and interesting point, is that when the body becomes saturated, this means that the maximum amount of nitrogen has been absorbed into the bloodstream, no matter how much longer the diver spends at that pressure deep down under the water, it won't make a difference on the diver's physical health while they are down there.

And it also won't add to the time needed for their eventual re-acclimatization.

So, enter the clever new diving technique of saturation diving.

And it was an absolute game changer for commercial diving because it allowed for hugely extended periods of time that divers could work at depth.

On the Bifid Dolphin, divers were now able to spend 28 days at 9 atmospheres of pressure and then decompress all in one go at the end of that month and then re-enter normal life.

Essentially how it works is that the divers would live at the surface in a pressurised living chamber and they would go up and down from the ocean to this living chamber in a pod called a diving bell.

The diving bell is also pressurized like the living chamber and they are both kept at a constant pressure of nine atmospheres.

The same pressure as the divers experience at the drill site.

So whether they're at work drilling down at 20,000 feet or whether they're in the diving bell or whether they're in their living chamber for that entire 28 days they are kept at nine atmospheres of pressure.

So this ensures that for the 28 days they are working in one go, wherever they are, nine atmospheres is the environment at all times.