Re: Decompression sickness

From: Tony (ajw27703_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/17/05 

Date: 17 Feb 2005 05:15:26 -0800

Are you sure they exhale? I see that as soon as they come to surface
they exhale heavily

1: You can't exhale enough to completely empty your lungs.
2: Even if you did, there's probably be some gases liberated from the
blood stream: CO2 there would be greater than C02 in the potential
space in the lungs.

About outgassing -- N2 coming out of the bloodstream into the joints.
The amount of gas a liquid can hold has everything to do with the
ambient pressure of the gas. Until you get into nonlinearities, double
the pressure, double the weight of the gas in the fluid. So, if your
blood is saturated with N2 at sea level, and you dive deeply, unless
you add more nitrogen to the blood it just becomes less saturated. If
you go down 30 odd feet (1 additional atmosphere of pressure) , for
example, without scuba, your blood will be holding only half the N2 it
could hold. You could come up very quickly, there'd be no driving force
for the gas to come out of the solution.

I think when Uncle Al talks about whales showing signs of bends, it
must be because the gas in their lungs have an opportunity to be driven
into solution.

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