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very shallow depths.
Thanks to our inability to conquer the bends, diving below 70m still remains
astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts. Ultra-deep
diving is so lethal that more people have walked on the moon than descended
below 240m using scuba gear.
to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like
fish.
explains Lande, a 79-year-old inventor from St Louis, Missouri. “But once
that oxygenated liquid is inside your lungs it would feel just like
breathing air.”
highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can
dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an
enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear
cavities.
“scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein
in the leg.
about decompression sickness - the often fatal condition known as “the
bends” which occurs when nitrogen dissolved in the blood under the immense
pressures of deep water bubbles out as we rise. It could potentially allow
them to descend to far greater depths than is currently possible.
in James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss – but it is already used by a
handful of cutting-edge American hospitals for highly premature babies.
their lungs are not developed enough to comfortably adjust from the liquid
environment of the womb to inhaling gaseous air. Immature alveoli, the final
branchings inside the lung that feed oxygen into the blood, lack vital
surfactants which stop the tiny cavities sticking together when we breathe
out.
animal flounders wildly. Everything the mouse has ever learned screams at it
to avoid inhaling a solution it thinks will kill it.
is overridden by a stronger instinct to take in one last breath. It is a
desperate final attempt to get oxygen into the blood. If the liquid we are
in contains oxygen molecules that happily cross from the solution into our
blood stream, life will return. After all, it is not water that kills us
when we drown. It’s our inability to take oxygen from the water that
condemns us.
ventilation techniques on premature babies and were stunned by the results.
“But when we get them on to liquid breathing we see close to 60% going on to
lead fully healthy lives.”
from the drug companies,” he says. “Unfortunately premature babies don’t
have a voice. They don’t bring in money, so no-one really wants to invest.
But it does work. Physiologically, liquid ventilation is very do-able.”
drug companies are reluctant to fully explore liquid breathing, the Deep
Water Horizon disaster has reignited the debate over how to get divers
safely down to extreme depths.
from the safety of robotic vessels and submarines; or by using saturation
diving, an incredibly complicated technique where divers have to be brought
up to the surface in a pressurised container over a matter of weeks.
equipment the record is 318m, set by the South African diver Nuno Gomes in
June 2005. It took him 14 minutes to descend and 12 hours to come back up to
the surface.
breathe in water. Under the incredible pressure exerted by billions of
tonnes of ocean, gasses like nitrogen and helium dissolve into our
bloodstream, much like CO2 is dissolved in a soda bottle.
out of solution and into our bodies. If we don’t give our bodies enough time
to expel those gasses by ascending slowly, we die.
highly compressed gasses in the lungs that are going to dissolve into the
blood,” says Dr Lande, who recently presented a paper on his patent to the
first International Conference on Applied Bionics and Biomechanics in
Venice. “You have a liquid that you can infuse just as much oxygen as you
need.”
the technique to work. “I have personally put mammals down to a simulated
depth of 1000 feet and then decompressed them in half a second and they have
no decompression sickness,” he says.
early 1980s according to Shaffer who says he met a former Seal turned doctor
that was on the team.
explains. “Other than going very deep I don’t know what the point was. But
they tried it. The Navy pushed them to the point where they did it several
times a week.”
the Seals reportedly developed stress fractures on the ribs cause by the
sheer force of trying to get a liquid in and out of the lungs.
of medieval armour, which compresses the diaphragm and makes it easier to
breathe liquid.
willing to test his ideas.
highest mountains, sent people into space. It’s time to find ways of
exploring the deep oceans.
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