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How To Survive Hypoxia On The Seabed

Yithian

Parish Watch
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Following on from an old thread of mine:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/how-to-fall-35-000-feet—and-survive.40498/

This long article covers a lot of ground with the starting point of a man who survived despite having run out of oxygen 328ft beneath the surface of the sea while repairing underwater piping. The suggestion is that the loss of his hot water flow resulted in his body temperature (and brain) rapidly cooling, his metabolism slowing and his oxygen requirement being significantly reduced. Additionally, the pressurised gas that divers breathe is more easily/fully absorbed into the blood stream than the oxygen from air, and this may have given him a 'cushion' that further enlarged his survival window. Perhaps the most surprising fact is how easily he was revived: a couple of breaths of mouth-to-mouth and he spluttered back to life.

Strangely, the figures are not explicitly stated, but this man lost his oxygen supply, leaving him with a reserve of between six or seven minutes of standard breathing time and was not recovered from the sea for thirty minutes. This would suggest that, to make a conservative estimate, he survived at least twenty minutes without breathing--and walked away with no more than a couple of bruises!

From there, the discussion turns to physiological differences among humans and remarkable adaptations some groups have achieved.

Long Read:

Science tells us the human body can only survive for a few minutes without oxygen.
But some people are defying this accepted truth.

By Richard Gray​
23 April 2019​
There was a sickening crack when the thick cable connecting Chris Lemons to the ship above him snapped. This vital umbilical cord to the world above carried power, communications, heat and air to his diving suit 100m (328ft) below the surface of the sea.
While his colleagues remember the terrible noise of this lifeline breaking, Lemons himself heard nothing. One moment he was jammed against the metal underwater structure they had been working on and then he was tumbling backwards towards the ocean floor. His link to the ship above was gone, along with any hope of finding his way back to it.
Most crucially, his air supply had also vanished, leaving him with just six or seven minutes of emergency air supply. Over the next 30 minutes at the bottom of the North Sea, Lemons would experience something that few people have lived to talk about: he ran out of air.
“I’m not sure I had a full handle on what was happening,” recalls Lemons. “I hit the sea bed on my back and was surrounded by an all-encompassing darkness. I knew I had a very small amount of gas on my back and my chances of getting out of it were almost non-existent. A kind of resignation came over me. I remember being taken over by grief in some ways.”
Lemons had been part of a saturation dive team fixing piping on an oil well manifold at the Huntington Oil Field, around 127miles (204km) east of Aberdeen on the east coast of Scotland. To do this work, divers must spend a month living, sleeping and eating in specially constructed chambers on board the dive ship, separated from the rest of the crew by a sheet of metal and glass. In these 6m-long tubes, the three divers acclimatise to the pressures they will experience once underwater.
It is an unusual form of isolation. The three divers can talk to and see their crewmates outside the chamber, but they are otherwise cut off from them. The members of each team are entirely reliant upon one another – it takes six days of decompression before they can leave this hyperbaric chamber or help can get inside.
Continued:​
 
Fascinating story and topic ...
 
This tidbit is worth noting:

But his survival is not unheard of either. Tipton has examined 43 separate cases in the medical literature of people who have been submerged in water for long periods. Four of these recovered, including a two-and-a-half-year-old girl who survived being under water for at least 66 minutes.
“Children and women are more likely to survive because they are smaller and their bodies tend to cool much faster,” says Tipton.
 
Time for that man to buy a rebreather.
 
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