SCUBA SCIENCE

SCUBA is a little more complicated than jumping in the water, with a tank on your back. Proper training and understanding the impact underwater exploration has on the human body is important. This knowledge and experience will help you be a better, safer diver, and not just another underwater breather.

Boyle’s Law explains the inverse relationship of breathing gas and depth: as a diver descends breathing gas becomes denser. This concentration increases exponentially with depth. Henry’s Law tells us that as pressure increases, our bodies will absorb more gasses, and how this higher concentration of gas will accumulate in the body. Dalton’s Law describes another aspect of diving at depth.

Dalton’s Laws explains how the air we breathe is comprised of 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen. At 132 ft. air is denser by a factor of 5, therefore the component pressure of oxygen would increase to 1.05% and nitrogen to 3.9%. Also, a quantity of breathing gas that would last for 1 hr. at the surface, would only last 12 minutes at that depth, disregarding descent/ascent time. That is why monitoring depth, dive time and tank pressure is important in diving.