Death is a phenomenon that disgusts and scares us. None of us want to die, regardless of the ways in which this event unfortunately occurs. However, there are some truly gruesome and terrible deaths that it would really be better not to experience ourselves.
One of the most frightening deaths that can befall a human being usually occurs for a phenomenon related to decompression. It mainly affects divers and in particular people who work “in saturation”, that is, at a depth of over 300 meters and for long periods of time (from a few hours to even weeks).
In these conditions our body gets used to the pressure of the water column, as well as all the cells of our organism they begin to enrich themselves with nitrogencoming from the common air we use for our breathing.
This gas is completely harmless at depth, being subject like all the rest to the strong pressure of water, a condition which also leads it to dissolve in the bloodstream. However, if a person were to quickly ascend to the surface, this gas could risk killing them, increasing in volume and violently escaping from the tissues due to thesudden drop in pressure.
What basically happens when a diver approaches the surface too quickly, after having been underwater for minutes if not hours, is similar to what happens when you open a bottle of Coca Cola after it has been shaken. The gas contained in cells and blood suddenly increases in volumetearing capillaries and hitting various organs with its power, until it manages to come into equilibrium with the atmospheric pressure to which we are normally accustomed.
Most decompression victims therefore spend hours if not days complaining about the fort pain caused by the slow release of this gasfrom the cells of your body. Something worse however happens when you have been at depth for a long time and have accumulated significant amounts of nitrogen within the tissues.
As the Byford Dolphin accident shows, in that case nitrogen can kill you instantly, boiling your blood and ripping out your organs from the inside, so much so that in some cases the victims suffer a real extroversion of the digestive, circulatory and respiratory systems, which are violently expelled from the nose, rectum and mouth before the brain can immediately realize it.
A horrible end, dehumanizing even your poor remains into mush.
This phenomenon, among other things, can also occur in space, if we suddenly lose pressure inside our space suit.
It is precisely for this reason that from the 1950s onwards the various trade associations and oil companies – which use divers a lot – have worked so hard to reduce the risk faced by their deep-sea operators, inventing solutions that sometimes have not proved sufficient. to save people’s lives.