Strange But True: Mismanaged, scuba diving might make blood bubble, boil

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Published: May 12, 2009

Mismanaged, scuba diving might make blood bubble, boil

BY BILL SONES AND RICH SONES, PH.D.

Q: You never want to try this, but how might a certain mismanaged water sport get your body’s blood bubbling up and boiling over like a champagne bottle shooting out its cork?

A: Don scuba-diving gear, descend deep into the ocean and then resurface too fast, causing dissolved and compressed gases in your blood to come rapidly out of solution. It is a condition called "the bends,” marine scientist Ellen Prager says in "Chasing Science at Sea.” At the surface, there is one atmosphere of pressure from the weight of the overlying air, then another for every 34 feet (10 meters) of water down, soon becoming an enormous pressure. As a diver goes deeper, this increased pressure causes the blood to absorb more gas, which must be slowly gotten rid of before returning to the surface.

Now, consider a bottle of champagne, its carbonation staying dissolved until you pop the cork, causing excess gas to expand rapidly and bubbles to shoot the cork across the room. "A diver’s body at depth can be likened to a champagne bottle that we don’t want to uncork.”

Prager says that while she was living in the Aquarius underwater habitat, a doctor made a "house call” for a checkup, took a sample of her blood and brought it directly to the surface. The blood bubbled so violently that it shot the stopper out of the vial — "a powerful and sobering illustration of what would happen if any of us, once saturated, made a beeline to the surface without going through decompression.”

Q: What were bottlenose dolphins spotted doing off the Australia coast, moving them into our celebrated category along with chimpanzees, sea otters and woodpecker finches?

A: The dolphins were sporting cone-shaped sea sponges on their beaks, the first clear case of tool use by wild dolphins or whales, Bruce Bower says in Science News. These "brainiacs of the marine world” will dive to the bottom of deep channels and poke their sponge-enhanced beaks into the sandy ocean floor to flush out small fish, devoting some 17 percent of their time "fishing” — more tool-time than any nonhuman animal, says biologist Janet Mann of Georgetown University.

Chimpanzees, it turns out, spend a small amount of time using tools; sea otters and killer whales appear to employ tool-help while foraging; and one group of woodpecker finches spends an estimated 10 percent of its time using twigs and cactus spines to pry insects and spiders out of tree holes.

Q: They can measure three football fields long and 14 stories high, move at 25-30 mph, generate 100,000 horsepower yet turn on a dime while spinning 360 degrees or moseying sideways. Perhaps you’ve luxuriated in one of these "skyscrapers at sea,” where one-third of the power generated goes to meeting the desires of its 18,000-plus inhabitants. Inhabitants of what?

A: Magnificently bedecked cruise ships such as the Oosterdam, owned by Holland America Line, boasting tanks and myriad mechanical systems spread across the lower decks and rarely seen by passengers, Mark Fischetti says in Scientific American magazine. A single engine could fill a suburban living room. Many ships incorporate a propulsion system, or Azipod, on a hefty swivel to allow movement in any direction. The price of this power and pampering (400 room stewards and 400 waitstaff) comes to about 90 gallons of heavy fuel oil consumed per mile at modest speed and 140,000 gallons of seawater desalinated daily to provide fresh water.

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