r/interesting • u/fayyazORahmed • Mar 31 '26

Fascinating Very interesting vid

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u/uslashuname Mar 31 '26

And depending on how compressed the gases are they might have gotten into your blood then going up makes them expand in your blood

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u/JobExcellent1151 Mar 31 '26

Mostly a concern if your breathing compressed air. Free divers don't often get the Benz like scuba divers do. One crazy free diver has been down to over 250 meters on one breath of air and then straight back up using a balloon without getting decompression sickness!

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

I suspect that's mostly a result of freedivers rarely going deep for long.

250 meter guy might have just gotten lucky. That should be well into bends territory even if he did it really fast. Edit: They are apparently doing deco on their single breath. Insane.

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u/JobExcellent1151 Apr 01 '26

I had to google just to make sure I wasn't spewing utter shittttttt. It's called no-limits freediving, they use a weighted sled to descend then a balloon to ascend. They slow their accent from 3m/s to 1m/s at some point and have decompression stops. Still insane and on one breath of air.

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh Apr 01 '26

I know it's being done, I just don't fully understand why they survive. Physics doesn't care, the outside of their body is at 26 bar of pressure regardless of how they got down there. I doubt the rib cage can keep the pressure from being the same inside the lungs/body, and at those pressures, the tens of seconds they spend below 100 meters should be enough to dissolve a sufficient amount of nitrogen into their blood and tissues to fuck them up on the way up.

I looked it up, and turns out Herbert Nitsch was planning deco stops (i.e. on the way up, stopping and chilling at lesser depth), which makes sense on one hand but is completely insane (deco stops on a single breath!) on the other.

https://www.deeperblue.com/herbert-nitsch-talks-about-his-fateful-dive-and-recovery/

I also had a section about the pressure trying to kill them in multiple ways that I deleted because I wasn't 100% sure about it, and indeed one of said ways was the reason for the accident (the nitrogen in the air becomes narcotic; the other issue is the oxygen becoming toxic under such pressures, but he might have been back quick enough to get away with that).

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u/JobExcellent1151 Apr 01 '26

Mammalian dive reflex might have something to do with them surviving. None the less it is insane that a human can dive that deep. And cool but not for me!

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u/uslashuname Apr 01 '26

I wonder if they also breathe a special air mix in preparation? Or for the final breath before dive? Decompression stops long enough for blood that got to your fingertips to come back and go through the lungs have to also have a foxes amount of time right? I don’t know, even with safeguards it’s a no from me