@@StreetPreacherr Not really, UA-cam is just so huge and influential. Nebula has some really good content on it, I found it worth subscribing to and they don’t have ads. They are adding more content creators bit by bit.
As an advanced open water certified scuba diver (max rated depth of 30m), it's very common for us to do a decompression stop at around 5m, just in case, even on "no decompression dives". One thing that wasn't mentioned, is the transition from diving, to airplane travel. Just because a dive has no need for decompression, it doesn't mean you are safe from DCS, getting into an airplane or even driving up a tall mountain can push the pressure difference past conventional dive tables, which assume you'll be exiting and remaining at or close to sea level.
This! Very important. Don't go on a deep dive the day before you board any plane. Even with every deco and safety stop religiously observed you may still be exposed to a mild case of the bends.
@@35manning I guessed that one right, that one and the Chimera episode. I felt so smart. The original CSI had an episode with someone that had Chimera so I was able to carry it over.
DCS is even less understood than you imply. Yes, one of my diving instructors went diving east of the Rocky Mountains then in less then 8 hours drove over the mountains to the west coast and suffered DCS. Fortunately, she was skin bent and didn't have any lasting effects. However, there have been recorded cases of divers completing a series of single day dives, waiting 24 hours to board an airplane, staying well within recreational dive limits and succumbing to DSC. In other words, even following all the procedures laid out for recreational divers, you can still suffer from DCS. This is why, if you carefully read the paper you sign from resorts and dive shops, it says that you understand even when following all the procedures that diving is inherently danger and you can still suffer from DCS. When working, I never take two groups out in one day. Each group might be well within recreational dive limits but I have doubled my risk by diving twice as much in one day. Additionally, I use Nitrox even when not necessary. I set my computer to the most conservative settings. I take longer than necessary for surface intervals (pick dives sites which are further apart thus requiring longer surface intervals). Many of my colleagues take similar precautions yet I still hear about some suffering from mild cases of DCS. Scar tissue. Coronary disease. Water temperature (colder is worse). Dehydration. Lack of sleep. Alcohol/hungover. Age. All of these things makes a difference. Additionally, dive tables were derived from navy dive tables. A navy diver is in much better health than many recreational divers. So preventing DCS isn't the goal. You can never guarantee prevention. You want to reduce the risk of DCS. It will never be zero. But you can make it so low that it isn't significant.
Yeah I thought that as well, only significant error was in implying Helium was not a consideration for deco whereas it is a fast gas than nitrogen so for a technical sports dive it would like add to deco, particularly deep stops. For a saturation dive it would help.
The bends is certainly rough and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I think “most gruesome way to die” goes to Hisashi Ouchi and the Tokaimura criticality accident.
I believe they were referring to the specific incident at that oil rig as the "most gruesome accident". I would have to agree with the video when referring to the "most gruesome" moniker. From a physics standpoint what happened to their bodies and what was left of their remains was way more gruesome. Ouchi's accident would more so be in the "most painful and torturous" category as it took so long for him to finally pass away.
@@AshleesBathroom I had to Google, but he got really bad radiation exposure. His skin was pealing, organs failed including multiple heart attacks, eyes became bloodshot red and he was in a lot of pain for months. Doctors were trying to save him at the hospital while all this was going on
Simon, as a diving Instructor, this was well put together. Nice to finally hear someone mentioning Oxygen toxicity, especially as I cringe every time I hear a news item mention we breathe O2 while scuba diving, and not the compressed air that we do. Also your follow through of commercial diving and technical deep diving. Thank you
Nitrogen narcosis nearly took the life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau during a deep dive in 1953. He's the one who referred to it as the "rapture of the deep" because he wanted to go further down. Fortunately for him, and for us, some small part of his mind resisted said urge, and he instead ascended to safety, and went on to advance oceanography for years to come. I believe there is an account of this near-mishap with the Aqua-Lung in his 1954 book _The Silent World_ (co-written with fellow diver Frédéric Dumas).
I love his name for it, rapture of the deep. There's an awesome old video of him diving a tidal ocean cave that I saw on the dive talk channel, such a cool man
My papaw had a friend who was on the rescue squad in a city close to where we live. He had accidentally grabbed tanks with the wrong gas mixture mixture for his dive (they were doing body recovery in a lake) and the man asphixiated and passed out underwater. They rapidly brought the guy to the surface and put him in a recompression chamber and he ended up having a heart attack in the chamber and died. Diving is really fun but you have to be really really careful with everything.
A really good feature of UK recreational diver certification is that the lowest level teaches about decompression sickness and how to avoid / mitigate it even though it only qualifies you to dive to a depth of 19 meters where there is a very low risk of it happening, so by the time you are diving deep enough for it to be an issue the knowledge and techniques used are already ingrained as habit.
The big issue with US dive certification is that we have 2 primary groups that issue licenses and teach courses. PADI and the newer, increasingly popular SDI. They both teach about decompression sickness, "soft celings", and "saftey stops". But my big issue is the difference in how they teach divers to monitor this. SDI teaches that you MUST have a dive computer, they teach how to use it, and just tell you to trust it. While PADI still teaches actual decompression tables, which your expected to memorize/remember and/or regularly check. I personally do not think it's wise to place all your faith in an electronic gizmo that CAN malfunction, run out of battery, or just die. I really think it's dangerous for SDI to not even teach or explain how to read/use a decompression table. It results in a lot of licensed divers that are basically helpless if their dive computer stops working while out on a trip, or even worse if it happens at depth.
While true, they also teach you to just do no deco dives, so if your computer fails an immediate regular slow ascend with a safty stop should suffice. But i agree, computers are not failsafe even if they have power. Usually they are set to the least conservative setting when you get them and in cold waters or exhausting dives this can not be enough. Personally I carry a sealed deco table as a backup. However mistakes can quicky be made on such tables, especially with subsequent dives, so I can also see the philosophy behind sticking to computers. Ha, when I started all we did were deco dives, fun times ;)
Honestly I like ads in the front of the vid instead of in the middle on the vid. I tend to watch the ad this way ratter than fast forwarding when the ad is in the middle
Shortly after I first received my open water scuba qualification my friend, a scuba instructor, took me on a dive to 130 ft, the max for my qualifications, so that I would experience nitrogen narcosis first hand. I'm glad he did. It's like an instant high, everything was colorful and pretty and I felt so carefree, then he brought me up 20 ft and it was instantly gone. During that brief experience I came close to ditching my reg and tanks and just go sightseeing. It was a scary and sobering experience. It's only one of the reasons we dive in pairs, never alone.
Firstly, open water cert divers maximum depth is 18m Second, your scuba instructor wouldn’t do that, because it’s not protocol and if something goes wrong, lawsuit, no insurance. Third, the way you describe getting narc’d seems very much like fantasy.
@@UA-cam_user3333 1. My cert at the time was 130 ft., ya we still used feet way back then. 2. He was not my instructor, he was my close friend and constant wreck dive buddy who I helped on courses during my rescue diver course. 3. Narc has man different symptoms for different divers, but most report some sort of euphoria, the dangers go away, that's what kills in a hostile environment. You should try it sometime, it can be very peaceful and almost spiritual at times.
@@Nomad77ca no one should "try it"... since it's highly dangerous! giving advice like that could make you (at least in the moral, if not legal sense) guilty of someone's death.... I myself am very Pro Free-Speech, but be careful with what you say....
@@Nomad77ca no one should try going to dangerous depth when scuba diving... normal scuba diving is safe if you get proper instruction, & then hoan your skills to SLOWLY expand your ability... what you describe is a risky maneuver that should not be attempted by 99% of the people around. yes a few divers might have the skill to get away with it... but, even they are taking a very high risk. most, do not even know enough to understand how dangerous that is...
The 2009 report from the Buford Dolphin suggested that it was faulty equipment rather than human error that was responsible for this gruesome accident. I only mention this because of the tarnished name and easy scapegoating of a man who also tragically died in the accident. Thanks for another great video. 💕 🐱
Yeah, combination of both. There were supposed to be lock-outs that would have prevented exactly that sort of accident, but the company didn't want to pay or wait for them to be installed.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni Exactly. Easier to scapegoat someone who is dead. Redundancy and safety mechanisms are imperative when dealing with irreversible and instantaneously lethal consequences.
How you managed to present so much information around this subject so eloquently in just 15 minutes, or actually less than that, is rather impressive. Very little that was new to me, but... wow.
Which is also part and parcel of why there often is still a pay gap between men and women. Most of these ludicrously well paid jobs simply aren't chosen by women, shifting the average pay across all jobs for women to be lower. If the gap were statistically normalized for the discrepancies of which jobs women LIKE to do instead of which jobs women ACTUALLY do then the wage gap diminishes to almost zero.
I appreciate whoever edited this, using a screenshot from a certain scene in “Total Recall.” Now the sounds Arnold makes as his eyeballs bulged out of his head are stuck in mine.
As a PADI dive master, cave diver, BSAC CEO, shark fighter, free diver, navy seal who once dived to the center of the earth itself: well done incredibly well researched topic and well presented.
In reality I'm a BSAC sports diver with only 32 dives logged. I just found it funny how everyone was using fake compliments to brag about their own scuba diving achievements and understanding of decompression illness.
From what I remember, the sudden drop in pressure did not blow that one diver to bits on its own. Rather, since he was standing so close to the chamber/bell connection when the dumbass outside decoupled them too soon, he was sucked through the narrow gap that had been opened between the decom chamber and the prematurely-detached diving bell, a gap far smaller than he was, and so he was crunched down / ripped apart in order to, uh, "fit" through the gap. Look up the trope "Fold-Spindle Mutilation".
Dinve instructor here. Thanks for the really well-covered topic! It's good to see someone breaking down these more technical points in to stuff everyone can understand. That being said, especially for recreational (40 metres or shallower) diving, DCS is really quite rare as long as you approach the dive sensibly and stay within your limits. Also those giant creatures that live down there...they're really cool!
I’m a big wave tow surfer (40-50’ max, not the Nazare 90’ waves rushing into cliffs kind of stuff), been surfing since childhood since I grew up on a farm on the coast of BC. We were surfing in Jaws in Maui’s North Shore, waves were about 45 feet. There were divers nearby, and one got caught hard by an incoming swell. I was getting towed into a wave when the panic broke out. The divers buddy has to go down almost 200’ to get him, and he was almost out of air. He went straight down, grabbed his buddy who was out of air, he had no time to stop for decompression, and ended up with an awful case of the bends. The original guy who went under died, and the guy who saved him has no feelings in his legs. He can walk, with crutches, but still has no feeling below the waist. It was frightening for me as well, because while my partner stayed with me, the designated safety ski took off to help, so If I wiped out and got pounded, I inly had one guy looking for me (we wear flotation vests underneath our suits, but waves don’t care about vests and can keep you under for as much as a minute). Thankfully I rode it out and we were able to stay out if the way and not complicate the rescue.
I used to have my nitrox license. My instructor told me about a friend of his who got nitrogen narcosis and ended up sharing his air with a rock, thinking it was another diver who'd lost his gear. He refused to surface. I don't remember the end of the story but I'm pretty sure that friend was...lost..
@@Exponaut_R-01 I guess the Lore could have Alterra give its employees a nanomachine treatment wherein nanites could prevent things like nitrogen narcosis, but at the same time, I feel that should have also come with some really strong anaerobic metabolism augmentations to make their dives last much longer.
I ended up with dcs when I lived/ worked in Egypt. Getting me to the chamber at Sharm El Sheik was a wee disaster and the young, male nurse who had yet to discover showers or deodorant that spent the duration with me in the chamber didn't help the atmosphere ( pun intended ), though I survived and after my insurance was verified was well treated. Thumbs up to the team at Sharm!
DCS is classified by symptoms. The earliest descriptions of DCS used the terms: "bends" for joint or skeletal pain; "chokes" for breathing problems; and "staggers" for neurological problems. So this is one of a few symptoms of decompression sickness.
For some reason I thought you had to be surrounded by the pressure of water for the bends to be a possibility, but makes sense it could affect astronauts as well.
Scuba diving is the only thing I want to do. Show me a spider on land and I will run away screaming. Show me the scariest thing imaginable underwater and I will swim right up to it and stick a camera in it's face.
If I remember correctly, divers breathing Heliox use voice modulators in their comm systems, which lower the pitch of their voices to normal-ish frequencies.
My nan's sisters husband use to do deep sea diving and he's told me so of the cool and crazy things he's seen down there. Working at sea is dangerous, working on an oil rig is even more dangerous and sat diving (which is what he use to do) is even MORE dangerous. It did pay well though.
You can get the bends on an airplane. I have seen it. One of my friends had been diving to 12m the day before we went to the Duxford Airshow in 2017, and got it on the plane. An ambulance where waiting when the plane landed, and drove him to the nearest decompression chamber.
Humans are so funny sometimes. We're like "oh this kills us"... "lets keep trying to find ways to do this thing we aren't meant to do because it kills us". I admire it but man I never want to go that deep into the ocea
On one of my dives last Monday we had a bull shark circle us the entire time we were in the water. It was really cool. When you are down there, you just, are there. Nothing special. Fish and turtles come up to you, and aren't really bothered. Crustaceans though are a bit more scared. The bull shark was just curious about us. didn't get too close and watched us ascend and descend.
As a diver this is way scarier than sharks. One good thing about the lower level diving qualifications is that they teach it immediately regardless of not being able to really get DCS from those depths
I think I almost caught the bends outside my local bar one night. I started out walking giddy and happy and ended up angry and confused. I found my car keys eight hours later. Very strange. 🤨
Still happens to pros. The wreck of the Italian liner Andrea Doria has drawn many divers, hunting for trophies. So far over 20 have died. 22 I believe, most from the bends.
As a PADI Diver, I fully understand what happened to the divers on the "Dolphin". I tried to close my ears when you were talking about it! Thanks for the picture from Total Recall! I really didn't need the image to visualise!
i love how you chose to watch this video on your own free will, yet you were “forced” to view an image in said video about the reason behind such an image. If you know enough about it, don’t force yourself to traumatize yourself voluntarily, then be sarcastic in the comments 😉
Today I Found Out - I NEVER want to be a diver! 😮 As if the "Bends" aren't bad enough, you had to bring up the creepy creatures just waiting for us down there! I can just see something with big dark tentacles reaching out of a shipwreck and grabbing me! 😖 Thanks for the nightmares!
This makes me think of the horrible byford dolphin incident which happened when a team was put In a capsule which was lowered into the ocean but the incident happened when a member of the crew opened the door too quickly which caused rapid decompression from 9 atmospheres to one and instantaneously combusted, causing the crew to explode with only one survivor😢
Can a saturation diving platform "which, despite recommendations [...] had not been fitted with any [...] safety features to prevent the diving chamber from being disconnected while pressurised" really be described as "Sophisticated"?
Yea, indeed it can. Yet we often learn the most of construction and engineering errors through such terrible accidents. Planes, ships, cars, heck, even bicycles used to feature technically insufficient solutions that today we gasp at. In their time they were considered normal, until something tragic happened whereupon this was changed. It has nothing to do with nationality. Btw: I'm German, not French.
The upside to painful deaths is that you won't have that existential fear of your coming death, you won't be sad or afraid, YOU'LL WANT IT. To me, that's morbidly comforting? At least I won't be upset about dying.
After extensive surgery for necrotising faciitus I enjoyed an hour in the hospital decompression chamber every four hours for 3 weeks to assist in the healing process of the wound. It became a nightmare. I developed claustrophobia and towards the end required sedatives, muscle relaxants and anti medication to manage the chamber "trips". It worked in the healing process so I can be grateful for the technology and kindness of the medical staff who saved my life. Didn't enjoy the experience though.
Very well researched and presented! its been about a decade since i last went diving, and about 20 years since i took my PADI advanced open water course - I seem to recall hearing that the technical divers (which I am not) would use argox, a mixture of argon and oxygen. Has that been replaced by heliox? or did i mistake people speculating about advancements in technical dive gas mixes?
I clicked on this video to hear Simon talk about decompression sickness and ended up learning that my family is named after a watertight structure used to work on foundations under water. TIL, indeed.
As a diver that just recovered from the bends, it’s indeed painful but arguing it’s one off the most gruesome ways is just ridiculous considering what ways many people have died
The 100ft/33meter limit for recreational diving is more importantly about oxygen toxicity. At depths over 33meters down oxygen can become surprisingly dangerous and can cause full body seizures. Experienced divers use the euphemism of "taking a hit" or a "CNS hit" to refer to this. Most of the basic dive rules change dramatically once you cross 100 feet down, it becomes significantly more complex and requires much more training. This is why basic sport divers are generally just taught that caves and depths past 100 feet are completely off-limits. You need special equipment and training to dive, you need MORE specialized equipment and training for deep/cave dives, both of these things kill plenty of foolish sport divers every year. There is nothing that deep, or in a cave, worth dying over.
Can we dial it back a little? Oxygen becomes toxic as its partial pressure approaches two atmospheres absolute (approximately 33 feet of seawater if you were breathing pure oxygen). Diving normal air mixture, you would not reach toxicity until nearly 300 fsw. Now, for safety purposes this oxygen number is reduced to a partial pressure of 1.6 atm abs (approximately 220 ft/66 m). In the United States, the depth limit for recreational diving is 130 fsw (~40 msw) Past 100 fsw (~30 msw), for most recreational divers, the issue will be nitrogen narcosis (rapture of the deep), which Simon discussed. The biggest issue with nitrogen narcosis is the impaired judgement. It is similar to being drunk underwater and it has many of the same downsides as being drunk, except it is easy to clear it up and there is no hangover. Cave diving is dangerous and requires specialized training and equipment. If you are no longer to able to safely ascend straight up to the surface from your dive, you are no longer doing recreational diving and you need the right equipment and training to do it safely.
I seem to remember the Soviets (later Russia & Azerbaijan) would use a mixture based on Xenon & Argon replacing Nitrogen... according to people with experience, these gasses needed to be balanced properly since one caused Euphoria whilst the other caused Depression... never remotely understood the mechanism myself, since that basically brakes my understanding of how noble gasses work... but anyway...
I don’t usually suffer with claustrophobia, but when hearing about the diving chamber and all that, I definitely felt it! Big nope for me to go deep diving! I’m even terrified of unknown depths and being out at sea or large lake and not seeing land. I’ve done one dive with scuba gear on, it was in an indoor regular swimming pool with a maximum depth of about 12ft, a depth I can easily dive down to just by holding my breath. I was totally fine diving in that environment but I’ll just stick to that experience, diving in murky waters or waters full of jellyfish and other stingy or bitey creatures is just a no. I don’t even swim in the ocean because of all the crazy critters there, I only take a dip in fresh water lakes or pools 😂
You shold really take a closer lock into the Norwegian deep diving experiments with our divers.. Its realy scary , one of my early "girlfreind/classmate" in late 70s actually died during extreeme expremential diving for our gouverment All to test of we could build the "Troll field" Witch in turn was after pressure from Regan to make europa less dependant on Russian energy! Ring any bells today? (Followed by X files music🤡)
I did my PADI Open Water qualification in an attempt to get over my fear of the sea; it gave me several more reasons to be afraid of the sea. It's easier to survive on space than it is at 100m below sea level. Water pressure is insane and we are not designed to deal with it in any way.
I remember watching a PBS documentary in the late 80s where all of the divers were, very obviously, breathing Heli-Ox. I don't remember why or where unfortunately. My father, a former submariner, explained why they sounded like chipmunks though. Sphere was a good fuckin' book.
As a technical diving Instructor who has seen a few deaths, getting bent is not the worse way to die through the sport. Having an air embolism in the lung from surging to the surface is far worse. I have seen the effect as great chunks of lung and blood surge out of the nose and mouth. Dcs is painful, it's far more common when some divers go beyond their training.
5.35. you mean impede. after all expede means - It is the past participle form of the verb "expede," which means to facilitate, hasten, or speed up the progress of something. However, it is worth noting that "expede" is considered an archaic or uncommon term in modern usage. In most cases, people would use more common words like "facilitate," "accelerate," or "expedite" to convey a similar meaning. the greater times help them to stay underwater even longer? lol
I always think it's interesting that this deadly phenomena has existed since the beginning of humanity and been lurking there all that time until we as a species finally became advanced enough to "discover" it. Truly a "horrors beyond your comprehension" moment, it makes you wonder that other horrors exist for humans yet that we can't even conceive of and are totally unprepared for
The first time i ever dived i couldn't get Homer Simpson singing "Under the Sea" out of my head. It was so great i truly just wanted to pack up and live under the sea 😂
the last time I had a helium tank was in college, my roommates and I bought it to fill balloons for a party, but we obviously made sure we had enough left over to have fun with lmao
Governments should never be liable in civil lawsuits by their own people since an individuals mistake or any number of individual mistakes are not the fault of all the people as a whole. Since suing a government is suing taxpayers, no lawsuit against a persons own government should ever be permitted and in the rare cases it might be, no payment should ever exceed what the individual might be wxpected to pay in taxes in their lifetime.
Thank you to Wondrium for sponsoring today’s video! Signup for your FREE trial to Wondrium here: ow.ly/O0C250O5qyE
You just can't stop beating this dead horse huh? Is Decoding the Unknown somehow going to do a Byford Dolphin script next?
Maybe you could consider joining Nebula?
@@springbok4015 Do any of these 'curated' versions of UA-cam ever become successful?
@@StreetPreacherr Not really, UA-cam is just so huge and influential. Nebula has some really good content on it, I found it worth subscribing to and they don’t have ads. They are adding more content creators bit by bit.
"...there are people out there; no thank you."
My sentiments, exactly.
As an advanced open water certified scuba diver (max rated depth of 30m), it's very common for us to do a decompression stop at around 5m, just in case, even on "no decompression dives".
One thing that wasn't mentioned, is the transition from diving, to airplane travel.
Just because a dive has no need for decompression, it doesn't mean you are safe from DCS, getting into an airplane or even driving up a tall mountain can push the pressure difference past conventional dive tables, which assume you'll be exiting and remaining at or close to sea level.
This! Very important. Don't go on a deep dive the day before you board any plane. Even with every deco and safety stop religiously observed you may still be exposed to a mild case of the bends.
One thing i took away from the movie "The Firm" was don't dive an fly in the same 24 hours
@@shadowfox662 there was an episode of House where Dr House was flying and a passenger who didn't speak English had been diving.
@@35manning I guessed that one right, that one and the Chimera episode. I felt so smart. The original CSI had an episode with someone that had Chimera so I was able to carry it over.
DCS is even less understood than you imply. Yes, one of my diving instructors went diving east of the Rocky Mountains then in less then 8 hours drove over the mountains to the west coast and suffered DCS. Fortunately, she was skin bent and didn't have any lasting effects.
However, there have been recorded cases of divers completing a series of single day dives, waiting 24 hours to board an airplane, staying well within recreational dive limits and succumbing to DSC. In other words, even following all the procedures laid out for recreational divers, you can still suffer from DCS. This is why, if you carefully read the paper you sign from resorts and dive shops, it says that you understand even when following all the procedures that diving is inherently danger and you can still suffer from DCS.
When working, I never take two groups out in one day. Each group might be well within recreational dive limits but I have doubled my risk by diving twice as much in one day. Additionally, I use Nitrox even when not necessary. I set my computer to the most conservative settings. I take longer than necessary for surface intervals (pick dives sites which are further apart thus requiring longer surface intervals). Many of my colleagues take similar precautions yet I still hear about some suffering from mild cases of DCS.
Scar tissue. Coronary disease. Water temperature (colder is worse). Dehydration. Lack of sleep. Alcohol/hungover. Age. All of these things makes a difference. Additionally, dive tables were derived from navy dive tables. A navy diver is in much better health than many recreational divers. So preventing DCS isn't the goal. You can never guarantee prevention. You want to reduce the risk of DCS. It will never be zero. But you can make it so low that it isn't significant.
As a former professional diver, well done. Facts and figures all correct. Well researched and presented.
Yeah I thought that as well, only significant error was in implying Helium was not a consideration for deco whereas it is a fast gas than nitrogen so for a technical sports dive it would like add to deco, particularly deep stops. For a saturation dive it would help.
As a former recreational diver, I agree. Mostly everything to see is less than 60' deep, which isn't super risky.
The bends is certainly rough and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I think “most gruesome way to die” goes to Hisashi Ouchi and the Tokaimura criticality accident.
Yikes.. I remember that case.. poor guy.. horrifying 💯
I believe they were referring to the specific incident at that oil rig as the "most gruesome accident". I would have to agree with the video when referring to the "most gruesome" moniker. From a physics standpoint what happened to their bodies and what was left of their remains was way more gruesome. Ouchi's accident would more so be in the "most painful and torturous" category as it took so long for him to finally pass away.
What happened to Hisashi Ouchi?
@@AshleesBathroom I had to Google, but he got really bad radiation exposure. His skin was pealing, organs failed including multiple heart attacks, eyes became bloodshot red and he was in a lot of pain for months.
Doctors were trying to save him at the hospital while all this was going on
@@MikeBNumba6 jesus... that's horrible...
Simon, as a diving Instructor, this was well put together. Nice to finally hear someone mentioning Oxygen toxicity, especially as I cringe every time I hear a news item mention we breathe O2 while scuba diving, and not the compressed air that we do. Also your follow through of commercial diving and technical deep diving. Thank you
Nitrogen narcosis nearly took the life of Jacques-Yves Cousteau during a deep dive in 1953. He's the one who referred to it as the "rapture of the deep" because he wanted to go further down. Fortunately for him, and for us, some small part of his mind resisted said urge, and he instead ascended to safety, and went on to advance oceanography for years to come. I believe there is an account of this near-mishap with the Aqua-Lung in his 1954 book _The Silent World_ (co-written with fellow diver Frédéric Dumas).
I love his name for it, rapture of the deep. There's an awesome old video of him diving a tidal ocean cave that I saw on the dive talk channel, such a cool man
Getting narced is something every diver has had at some point.
My papaw had a friend who was on the rescue squad in a city close to where we live. He had accidentally grabbed tanks with the wrong gas mixture mixture for his dive (they were doing body recovery in a lake) and the man asphixiated and passed out underwater. They rapidly brought the guy to the surface and put him in a recompression chamber and he ended up having a heart attack in the chamber and died. Diving is really fun but you have to be really really careful with everything.
A really good feature of UK recreational diver certification is that the lowest level teaches about decompression sickness and how to avoid / mitigate it even though it only qualifies you to dive to a depth of 19 meters where there is a very low risk of it happening, so by the time you are diving deep enough for it to be an issue the knowledge and techniques used are already ingrained as habit.
Pretty sure that’s standard in every agency around the world…not exclusively the UK.
The big issue with US dive certification is that we have 2 primary groups that issue licenses and teach courses. PADI and the newer, increasingly popular SDI. They both teach about decompression sickness, "soft celings", and "saftey stops". But my big issue is the difference in how they teach divers to monitor this. SDI teaches that you MUST have a dive computer, they teach how to use it, and just tell you to trust it. While PADI still teaches actual decompression tables, which your expected to memorize/remember and/or regularly check. I personally do not think it's wise to place all your faith in an electronic gizmo that CAN malfunction, run out of battery, or just die. I really think it's dangerous for SDI to not even teach or explain how to read/use a decompression table. It results in a lot of licensed divers that are basically helpless if their dive computer stops working while out on a trip, or even worse if it happens at depth.
@@Robert_H_Diver I only have first hand knowledge of the UK system and didn't want to assume, but that's good to know.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni GLADI went with PADI
While true, they also teach you to just do no deco dives, so if your computer fails an immediate regular slow ascend with a safty stop should suffice. But i agree, computers are not failsafe even if they have power. Usually they are set to the least conservative setting when you get them and in cold waters or exhausting dives this can not be enough. Personally I carry a sealed deco table as a backup. However mistakes can quicky be made on such tables, especially with subsequent dives, so I can also see the philosophy behind sticking to computers. Ha, when I started all we did were deco dives, fun times ;)
It's almost like we don't belong that far underwater!! 😅
Every diver ever: Challenge accepted.
@@Zeppathy _"Dave Not Coming Back"_
And yet we have mammalian dive reflex.
Honestly I like ads in the front of the vid instead of in the middle on the vid. I tend to watch the ad this way ratter than fast forwarding when the ad is in the middle
Fuck ads. All are bad. Skip everything.
I’ve noticed I do that too
Shortly after I first received my open water scuba qualification my friend, a scuba instructor, took me on a dive to 130 ft, the max for my qualifications, so that I would experience nitrogen narcosis first hand. I'm glad he did. It's like an instant high, everything was colorful and pretty and I felt so carefree, then he brought me up 20 ft and it was instantly gone. During that brief experience I came close to ditching my reg and tanks and just go sightseeing. It was a scary and sobering experience. It's only one of the reasons we dive in pairs, never alone.
Firstly, open water cert divers maximum depth is 18m
Second, your scuba instructor wouldn’t do that, because it’s not protocol and if something goes wrong, lawsuit, no insurance.
Third, the way you describe getting narc’d seems very much like fantasy.
@@UA-cam_user3333 1. My cert at the time was 130 ft., ya we still used feet way back then.
2. He was not my instructor, he was my close friend and constant wreck dive buddy who I helped on courses during my rescue diver course.
3. Narc has man different symptoms for different divers, but most report some sort of euphoria, the dangers go away, that's what kills in a hostile environment.
You should try it sometime, it can be very peaceful and almost spiritual at times.
@@Nomad77ca no one should "try it"... since it's highly dangerous!
giving advice like that could make you (at least in the moral, if not legal sense) guilty of someone's death....
I myself am very Pro Free-Speech, but be careful with what you say....
@@stanislavkostarnov2157 No one should try scuba diving, really?????
@@Nomad77ca no one should try going to dangerous depth when scuba diving...
normal scuba diving is safe if you get proper instruction, & then hoan your skills to SLOWLY expand your ability... what you describe is a risky maneuver that should not be attempted by 99% of the people around. yes a few divers might have the skill to get away with it... but, even they are taking a very high risk.
most, do not even know enough to understand how dangerous that is...
The 2009 report from the Buford Dolphin suggested that it was faulty equipment rather than human error that was responsible for this gruesome accident.
I only mention this because of the tarnished name and easy scapegoating of a man who also tragically died in the accident.
Thanks for another great video. 💕 🐱
Yeah, combination of both. There were supposed to be lock-outs that would have prevented exactly that sort of accident, but the company didn't want to pay or wait for them to be installed.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni Exactly. Easier to scapegoat someone who is dead. Redundancy and safety mechanisms are imperative when dealing with irreversible and instantaneously lethal consequences.
It was human error that was allowed to happen because of badly designed equipment.
@@iambiggus Yes, but that fault falls upon the designers, not upon the unfortunate operators.
@@iambiggus If the equipment was properly designed, it would have eleminated the human error, therefor it is faulty equipment that caused the tragedy.
"There are people out there, no thankyou!"
Simon whistler is my spirit animal, i am convinced
How you managed to present so much information around this subject so eloquently in just 15 minutes, or actually less than that, is rather impressive. Very little that was new to me, but... wow.
My hats off to anyone able to Sat. dive. Personally I can't think of a more terrifying job.
Which is also part and parcel of why there often is still a pay gap between men and women. Most of these ludicrously well paid jobs simply aren't chosen by women, shifting the average pay across all jobs for women to be lower. If the gap were statistically normalized for the discrepancies of which jobs women LIKE to do instead of which jobs women ACTUALLY do then the wage gap diminishes to almost zero.
@@RustyDust101 💯
@@RustyDust101absolutely wrong. How do you explain the gaps in the same work place?
@@maisies515skills?
Misogyny? 🤣 don't ask males to validate it they'll never admit it, facing the way they personally think of women is too painful
I appreciate whoever edited this, using a screenshot from a certain scene in “Total Recall.” Now the sounds Arnold makes as his eyeballs bulged out of his head are stuck in mine.
I remember learning about the bends in Elementary school. The lesson always stuck with me
Same here. It was taught in elementary school science and iirc there were test questions on the test for that unit.
Another excellent episode Fact Boy. Very informative as always. Thank you to you and the team.
As a PADI dive master, cave diver, BSAC CEO, shark fighter, free diver, navy seal who once dived to the center of the earth itself:
well done incredibly well researched topic and well presented.
U didnt do that
I guess if they get tired of water boarding people they have a new thing they can do...
@@alexgarciamma You don't say, Sherlock
Honey, just stop.
In reality I'm a BSAC sports diver with only 32 dives logged. I just found it funny how everyone was using fake compliments to brag about their own scuba diving achievements and understanding of decompression illness.
From what I remember, the sudden drop in pressure did not blow that one diver to bits on its own. Rather, since he was standing so close to the chamber/bell connection when the dumbass outside decoupled them too soon, he was sucked through the narrow gap that had been opened between the decom chamber and the prematurely-detached diving bell, a gap far smaller than he was, and so he was crunched down / ripped apart in order to, uh, "fit" through the gap. Look up the trope "Fold-Spindle Mutilation".
Dinve instructor here. Thanks for the really well-covered topic! It's good to see someone breaking down these more technical points in to stuff everyone can understand. That being said, especially for recreational (40 metres or shallower) diving, DCS is really quite rare as long as you approach the dive sensibly and stay within your limits. Also those giant creatures that live down there...they're really cool!
I’m a big wave tow surfer (40-50’ max, not the Nazare 90’ waves rushing into cliffs kind of stuff), been surfing since childhood since I grew up on a farm on the coast of BC.
We were surfing in Jaws in Maui’s North Shore, waves were about 45 feet.
There were divers nearby, and one got caught hard by an incoming swell. I was getting towed into a wave when the panic broke out. The divers buddy has to go down almost 200’ to get him, and he was almost out of air. He went straight down, grabbed his buddy who was out of air, he had no time to stop for decompression, and ended up with an awful case of the bends. The original guy who went under died, and the guy who saved him has no feelings in his legs. He can walk, with crutches, but still has no feeling below the waist.
It was frightening for me as well, because while my partner stayed with me, the designated safety ski took off to help, so If I wiped out and got pounded, I inly had one guy looking for me (we wear flotation vests underneath our suits, but waves don’t care about vests and can keep you under for as much as a minute). Thankfully I rode it out and we were able to stay out if the way and not complicate the rescue.
I used to have my nitrox license. My instructor told me about a friend of his who got nitrogen narcosis and ended up sharing his air with a rock, thinking it was another diver who'd lost his gear. He refused to surface. I don't remember the end of the story but I'm pretty sure that friend was...lost..
That is so tragic :(
Used to have nitrox license? They don’t expire 🤔
@@UA-cam_user3333I'm sure something happened for them to lose it or something
@@UA-cam_user3333
It might be for work purposes, companies may ask for regular training.
As you don't need a "licence" to dive anyway.
Good job Simon. As a retired Commercial Diver/SAT rat. You covered the topic well, as always.
He doesn’t do any of the research, he’s a presenter.
This was actually one of the main things that irritated me in Subnautica: No mention of the Bends at all.
I have a feeling it’s one of those things developers consider, but it’d be too tedious within the gameplay loop to keep handling the bends.
@@Exponaut_R-01 I guess the Lore could have Alterra give its employees a nanomachine treatment wherein nanites could prevent things like nitrogen narcosis, but at the same time, I feel that should have also come with some really strong anaerobic metabolism augmentations to make their dives last much longer.
Oh I wouldn't know anything about lore related reasons why I haven't played the game lol
Perhaps there's no nitrogen in the atmosphere
You can turn it on as the devs did program the system in, but they kept it off in the final product for the fun factor.
That was 9 atmosphere. Where the Titan Sub passengers were blasted at 600 atmospheres
I ended up with dcs when I lived/ worked in Egypt. Getting me to the chamber at Sharm El Sheik was a wee disaster and the young, male nurse who had yet to discover showers or deodorant that spent the duration with me in the chamber didn't help the atmosphere ( pun intended ), though I survived and after my insurance was verified was well treated. Thumbs up to the team at Sharm!
That must have been the same nurse who worked there I was working on a liveaboard as a Tech Instructor. He stunk.
DCS is classified by symptoms. The earliest descriptions of DCS used the terms: "bends" for joint or skeletal pain; "chokes" for breathing problems; and "staggers" for neurological problems.
So this is one of a few symptoms of decompression sickness.
Thanks so much for this,well researched,Having over 18,000 logged dives I have never had a bend.
Ever taken a CNS hit?
Ever taken a shit at 30,000 ft?
For some reason I thought you had to be surrounded by the pressure of water for the bends to be a possibility, but makes sense it could affect astronauts as well.
Actually, it's the difference of pressures in rapid succession that causes the bends, from high to low.
This came to the top of my feed today...
Scuba diving is the only thing I want to do. Show me a spider on land and I will run away screaming. Show me the scariest thing imaginable underwater and I will swim right up to it and stick a camera in it's face.
"Get bent" is a completely different insult, whether inside or outside of the diver community.
Scuba diver here - thanks for the great, factual content 👍
I can't explain why I dive, I can only say, it's magical down there
If I remember correctly, divers breathing Heliox use voice modulators in their comm systems, which lower the pitch of their voices to normal-ish frequencies.
Its called "the bends" so Thom Yorke could use it as a kick ass title for an album/song
My nan's sisters husband use to do deep sea diving and he's told me so of the cool and crazy things he's seen down there. Working at sea is dangerous, working on an oil rig is even more dangerous and sat diving (which is what he use to do) is even MORE dangerous.
It did pay well though.
SCUBA diver here, fantastic video on decompression and different gasses. You did your research on this.
You can get the bends on an airplane. I have seen it.
One of my friends had been diving to 12m the day before we went to the Duxford Airshow in 2017, and got it on the plane.
An ambulance where waiting when the plane landed, and drove him to the nearest decompression chamber.
Humans are so funny sometimes. We're like "oh this kills us"... "lets keep trying to find ways to do this thing we aren't meant to do because it kills us". I admire it but man I never want to go that deep into the ocea
The 007 movie 'License to Kill' shows somebody exploding in a decompression chamber. It was definitely a bloody and instant death.
On one of my dives last Monday we had a bull shark circle us the entire time we were in the water. It was really cool. When you are down there, you just, are there. Nothing special. Fish and turtles come up to you, and aren't really bothered. Crustaceans though are a bit more scared. The bull shark was just curious about us. didn't get too close and watched us ascend and descend.
Cool. I love sharks.
Being a diver sounds inconvenient. I mean one time you are just chilling and next whoops, there goes your liver.
absolutely LOSING IT at the ENRON POWER CO. mug our boy Simon's using in this episode's sponsor holy heck lmaooooooooo
Simon’s beard is big enough now to have its own sponsor
As a diver this is way scarier than sharks. One good thing about the lower level diving qualifications is that they teach it immediately regardless of not being able to really get DCS from those depths
The idea of Made in Abyss starts making a lot more sense.
Funny you mention this, I’m actually writing an entire fic where Riko is a human scuba diver and Reg is a merman!
Dude, there have been some absolutely horrific diving-bell deaths... scary shit...
Informative and hilarious in perfectly breathable proportions!👍
I think I almost caught the bends outside my local bar one night. I started out walking giddy and happy and ended up angry and confused. I found my car keys eight hours later. Very strange. 🤨
Still happens to pros. The wreck of the Italian liner Andrea Doria has drawn many divers, hunting for trophies. So far over 20 have died. 22 I believe, most from the bends.
"Why would you wanna go outside, there are people out there....no thank you" hahahahaha 😂
the rapid decompression also happened on a sealab mission
As a PADI Diver, I fully understand what happened to the divers on the "Dolphin". I tried to close my ears when you were talking about it! Thanks for the picture from Total Recall! I really didn't need the image to visualise!
i love how you chose to watch this video on your own free will, yet you were “forced” to view an image in said video about the reason behind such an image. If you know enough about it, don’t force yourself to traumatize yourself voluntarily, then be sarcastic in the comments 😉
Today I Found Out -
I NEVER want to be a diver! 😮 As if the "Bends" aren't bad enough, you had to bring up the creepy creatures just waiting for us down there!
I can just see something with big dark tentacles reaching out of a shipwreck and grabbing me! 😖 Thanks for the nightmares!
Luckily, anything with tentacles is relatively harmless to us
We don't have hentai tentacle monsters irl fortunately...😅
This aged well
The Abyss is an awesome movie.
The company name isn't "British Petroleum". It became simply "BP Plc" in 2001.
Ah yeah "BP, Bringing Oil to Americas Shores" like when they burst a line...
This makes me think of the horrible byford dolphin incident which happened when a team was put In a capsule which was lowered into the ocean but the incident happened when a member of the crew opened the door too quickly which caused rapid decompression from 9 atmospheres to one and instantaneously combusted, causing the crew to explode with only one survivor😢
...I guess you didn't bother to actually watch the video.
10:14 that recompression 'chamber' looks quite horrific😮
Today i found out they definitely don't pay enough
Can a saturation diving platform "which, despite recommendations [...] had not been fitted with any [...] safety features to prevent the diving chamber from being disconnected while pressurised" really be described as "Sophisticated"?
No, just French.
Yea, indeed it can. Yet we often learn the most of construction and engineering errors through such terrible accidents. Planes, ships, cars, heck, even bicycles used to feature technically insufficient solutions that today we gasp at. In their time they were considered normal, until something tragic happened whereupon this was changed. It has nothing to do with nationality. Btw: I'm German, not French.
@@RustyDust101 they KNEW they needed it, it had been RECOMMENDED, it's not like they didn't know it was a risk to them
I was secretly hoping Simon would imitate a chipmunk voice when he started talking about it haha
The upside to painful deaths is that you won't have that existential fear of your coming death, you won't be sad or afraid, YOU'LL WANT IT. To me, that's morbidly comforting? At least I won't be upset about dying.
It’s a great Radiohead album
After extensive surgery for necrotising faciitus I enjoyed an hour in the hospital decompression chamber every four hours for 3 weeks to assist in the healing process of the wound. It became a nightmare. I developed claustrophobia and towards the end required sedatives, muscle relaxants and anti medication to manage the chamber "trips". It worked in the healing process so I can be grateful for the technology and kindness of the medical staff who saved my life. Didn't enjoy the experience though.
Very well researched and presented!
its been about a decade since i last went diving, and about 20 years since i took my PADI advanced open water course - I seem to recall hearing that the technical divers (which I am not) would use argox, a mixture of argon and oxygen. Has that been replaced by heliox? or did i mistake people speculating about advancements in technical dive gas mixes?
In 'murica we pronounce "caisson" and "Khe Sanh" the same way.
I clicked on this video to hear Simon talk about decompression sickness and ended up learning that my family is named after a watertight structure used to work on foundations under water. TIL, indeed.
Great you got Wondrium as a sponsor. I watch their courses doing cardio. Great stuff.
As a diver that just recovered from the bends, it’s indeed painful but arguing it’s one off the most gruesome ways is just ridiculous considering what ways many people have died
The 100ft/33meter limit for recreational diving is more importantly about oxygen toxicity. At depths over 33meters down oxygen can become surprisingly dangerous and can cause full body seizures. Experienced divers use the euphemism of "taking a hit" or a "CNS hit" to refer to this.
Most of the basic dive rules change dramatically once you cross 100 feet down, it becomes significantly more complex and requires much more training. This is why basic sport divers are generally just taught that caves and depths past 100 feet are completely off-limits. You need special equipment and training to dive, you need MORE specialized equipment and training for deep/cave dives, both of these things kill plenty of foolish sport divers every year. There is nothing that deep, or in a cave, worth dying over.
Can we dial it back a little? Oxygen becomes toxic as its partial pressure approaches two atmospheres absolute (approximately 33 feet of seawater if you were breathing pure oxygen). Diving normal air mixture, you would not reach toxicity until nearly 300 fsw. Now, for safety purposes this oxygen number is reduced to a partial pressure of 1.6 atm abs (approximately 220 ft/66 m).
In the United States, the depth limit for recreational diving is 130 fsw (~40 msw) Past 100 fsw (~30 msw), for most recreational divers, the issue will be nitrogen narcosis (rapture of the deep), which Simon discussed. The biggest issue with nitrogen narcosis is the impaired judgement. It is similar to being drunk underwater and it has many of the same downsides as being drunk, except it is easy to clear it up and there is no hangover.
Cave diving is dangerous and requires specialized training and equipment. If you are no longer to able to safely ascend straight up to the surface from your dive, you are no longer doing recreational diving and you need the right equipment and training to do it safely.
radiohead refrence
I think divers who use helium have alot of reverb in the radio and a few other audio tricks to make the voices easier to understand. 12:05
8:32 - As horrific as that was, I'm glad they felt no pain or suffering. Just instant death without any fear or panic.
I seem to remember the Soviets (later Russia & Azerbaijan) would use a mixture based on Xenon & Argon replacing Nitrogen... according to people with experience, these gasses needed to be balanced properly since one caused Euphoria whilst the other caused Depression... never remotely understood the mechanism myself, since that basically brakes my understanding of how noble gasses work... but anyway...
You know, ive never really fully understood all of this, but I love knowledge, and this has helped me understand! Thank you!
I don’t usually suffer with claustrophobia, but when hearing about the diving chamber and all that, I definitely felt it!
Big nope for me to go deep diving! I’m even terrified of unknown depths and being out at sea or large lake and not seeing land.
I’ve done one dive with scuba gear on, it was in an indoor regular swimming pool with a maximum depth of about 12ft, a depth I can easily dive down to just by holding my breath. I was totally fine diving in that environment but I’ll just stick to that experience, diving in murky waters or waters full of jellyfish and other stingy or bitey creatures is just a no. I don’t even swim in the ocean because of all the crazy critters there, I only take a dip in fresh water lakes or pools 😂
You shold really take a closer lock into the Norwegian deep diving experiments with our divers..
Its realy scary , one of my early "girlfreind/classmate" in late 70s actually died during extreeme expremential diving for our gouverment
All to test of we could build the "Troll field"
Witch in turn was after pressure from Regan to make europa less dependant on Russian energy!
Ring any bells today? (Followed by X files music🤡)
I did my PADI Open Water qualification in an attempt to get over my fear of the sea; it gave me several more reasons to be afraid of the sea. It's easier to survive on space than it is at 100m below sea level. Water pressure is insane and we are not designed to deal with it in any way.
my baby's got the bends, oh no
Simon's presentation doesn't need any decompression
I remember watching a PBS documentary in the late 80s where all of the divers were, very obviously, breathing Heli-Ox. I don't remember why or where unfortunately. My father, a former submariner, explained why they sounded like chipmunks though.
Sphere was a good fuckin' book.
As a technical diving Instructor who has seen a few deaths, getting bent is not the worse way to die through the sport. Having an air embolism in the lung from surging to the surface is far worse. I have seen the effect as great chunks of lung and blood surge out of the nose and mouth. Dcs is painful, it's far more common when some divers go beyond their training.
"Before we dive into today's video...." Of course. :)
5.35. you mean impede. after all expede means - It is the past participle form of the verb "expede," which means to facilitate, hasten, or speed up the progress of something. However, it is worth noting that "expede" is considered an archaic or uncommon term in modern usage. In most cases, people would use more common words like "facilitate," "accelerate," or "expedite" to convey a similar meaning.
the greater times help them to stay underwater even longer? lol
Would love to hear about the invention of the diving bell 🔔.
I've been addicted to your videos as of late. You make amazing content ✨️
“Before we DIVE into this...”. “Dive”? Really good Simon sir? Too much pun is being had
"TOTALLY BUGGO!"
Yes, I yelled this out when we got to The Abyss mention.
The ending made me giggle 😊😊 another great video Simon!!
How does Simon still not know that “Bjorn” is not pronounced “buh-jorn”? 😂
I always think it's interesting that this deadly phenomena has existed since the beginning of humanity and been lurking there all that time until we as a species finally became advanced enough to "discover" it. Truly a "horrors beyond your comprehension" moment, it makes you wonder that other horrors exist for humans yet that we can't even conceive of and are totally unprepared for
The first time i ever dived i couldn't get Homer Simpson singing "Under the Sea" out of my head. It was so great i truly just wanted to pack up and live under the sea 😂
So happy you did this video I suggested! ❤️
the last time I had a helium tank was in college, my roommates and I bought it to fill balloons for a party, but we obviously made sure we had enough left over to have fun with lmao
The Eads bridge is still there today over the Mississippi River
I love scuba diving... 128 deep underwater... breathing almost 4 times the air at regular atmospheric pressure...
I once tried to breathe Hydrox but the crumbs gave me a coughing fit. I'm going to just eat them or Oreos from now on
Governments should never be liable in civil lawsuits by their own people since an individuals mistake or any number of individual mistakes are not the fault of all the people as a whole. Since suing a government is suing taxpayers, no lawsuit against a persons own government should ever be permitted and in the rare cases it might be, no payment should ever exceed what the individual might be wxpected to pay in taxes in their lifetime.
Most relatable ending ever! 😂