Pressure Change In Water

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Pressure change can be seen as the “pop” while ascending from the ground in an airplane or the increasingly greater force felt while swimming to the bottom of a swimming pool. Theoretically, if you were to keep swimming down deeper the pressure felt would continue to be greater. A scuba diver is an example of someone who performs under these conditions. Wearing 60-75 pounds of equipment equipped with a tank of breathing gas for a freedom of exploration, scuba divers seem invincible (Freudenrich).However, all it takes is a lack of understanding of the degree of danger that change in pressure that water can cause sickness. Just holding your breath alone could rupture a lung with all the pressure in deeper waters. It is clearly very important …show more content…
We constantly feel pressure all the time; however we are so used to this pressure that we never really notice it. What is noticeable is the feeling when we swim underwater at low depths or fly at high altitudes. This is because under these circumstances the human body experiences pressure it is not used to. For comparison, on the ground a person usually experiences about 1 atmosphere of pressure during everyday life. However due to water being more dense than air, it is known that divers are submitted to increased pressures. A used ratio to find this increase in pressure is ten metres of seawater/ 1 atmosphere (Meeraus). So Theoretically at a depth of 10 m a diver would feel the 1 atm of pressure from the air and another 1 atm from the 10 m equalling a total of 2 atm of pressure. Comparing this to the previous 1 atm of air pressure at sea level, a diver at a depth of 10m is already experiencing a pressure double that of someone at sea …show more content…
The major problem with increase with the increase in pressure while diving can be represented as a relationship known as Boyle’s Law: “The volume of a gas varies inversely with the pressure (Meeraus).” This relationship in terms of a scuba diver means that as the diver’s depth gets larger, the pressure increases, and the volume of the breathing gas in his tank decreases proportionally (2x pressure = ½ volume). The increase of pressure not only means decrease in volume but also an increase in solubility of the breath gas due to Henry’s Law: As partial pressure increases so does the solubility (Meeraus). Basically what the pressure creates is a more soluble compressed gas that the diver breathes in. The nitrogen that makes up 78% of air becomes very soluble and dissolves into the bloodstream and tissues while diving . However, unlike the oxygen, the body has no use for this nitrogen so it just builds up (Diving Physics). As the diver returns the surface pressure decreases and so does the solubility of the dissolved nitrogen so it returns to its gaseous state. The nitrogen forms bubbles in the blood and tissues similar to the bubbles of a soda can after it is opened and the pressure on the carbon dioxide decreases (Gases). These gas bubbles can potentially block the blood flow in the body and causing stretching or tearing in the muscle tissue(Fell 2015). In severe
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