Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.
1 Like
I am not a physiologist, but as I understand things…
Many mammals cannot directly control their breathing. Monkeys and apes cannot. Seals have very good control. We are somewhere between the two - we can hold our breath enough to swim and shallow dive, and there is a good theory that this allowed us to develop spoken language.
Around the 2-3 minute mark the CO2 build-up triggers the feeling of suffocation that usually forces us to breathe again. This level of CO2 is not fatal to us, but perhaps it is easy for our bodies to detect, and a common sign that we are breathing ‘bad air’. Apparently we can learn to ignore this signal just as we have learned to hold our breath, but without training we struggle to not-breathe, and that is what exhausts us.
The build-up of CO2 can be ignored for a while, but we cannot do without the lack of fresh oxygen. If we breathe pure nitrogen we have no build up of CO2 and no choking reaction: eventually, we just go to sleep and never wake up. There seems to be no alarm system for not having enough oxygen. There was a recent Futility Closet podcast where people had died from going into a room that had rusting metal, which had taken too much oxygen for people to survive. This is, I guess, what sets the 13-minute limit for most people who get beyond the 3-minute mark, and why you can extend it by hyperventilating on pure oxygen.
I can’t answer for what the spleen is doing, but there is probably someone in the Boingiverse who is building their a custom internet spleen on a 3D printer, and has a theory…
2 Likes
Not an expert, but I wonder if the CO2 is being soaked up by the lungs as usual, and while it probably accumulates there, some may be transferred to sea water and ejected from the body.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
