![]() ![]() When you eventually come back from a dive and you take your first breath, every time it feels like your first breath ever. We call this part the free-fall, the moment when freedivers stop moving completely, and the most beautiful part of the dive. ![]() Your body begins to sink a little bit like a stone. As you start to descend, the pressure of the water pushes you back towards the surface, until around 13m to 20m deep when the dynamic is reversed. You are buoyant at the surface and for the first few metres of the dive. So the most tricky part of a deep dive is the last stage of the ascent, when there is the risk of a shallow water black-out as the pressure fades and the oxygen levels in our tissues suddenly drop. But equally you need to stay completely aware of your body and where you are, entirely in the moment.Īt a depth of 10m we need more oxygen in our bloodstream than at 100m, because the pressure of the water all around makes the oxygen more potent. You need to let go of everything that you know and everything that makes you feel good or bad. It’s not about your physical ability, but about your mental skills and mental training basically. That’s what is incredible about free diving. ![]() There is an element of physicality but it’s mainly mental. How? Martina Amati, the free diver and artist involved in the project, tried to explain the mind set that goes with this extreme sport: It just can’t be done.”īut of course, free divers decided to do it anyway – and they swam well past those theoretical limits. So there’s no way that you can do this on breath-hold diving. They worked out what they understood about the human body and the effects of pressure on it and they said: “Well, look, your lungs are going to be crushed and you’re going to be spitting blood by the time you’re at 30 or 40 metres. They’d drawn their graphs as scientists and they’d worked out what they saw. In the very early days of free-diving, physiologists were pretty convinced that people couldn’t go beyond about 30 or 40 metres. Not only does it compress you and shrink the air-containing spaces in your body, but also it alters your physiology, alters the way the gases act within your blood stream and how they act on everything, including your nervous system. That starts to manipulate your body, your anatomy and your physiology in quite profound ways, which actually make the endeavour of diving into the deep ocean uniquely difficult. And for every 10m beyond you get another atmosphere of pressure. If you descend only 10m into the ocean, you are subjected to another additional atmosphere of pressure: that’s twice as much pressure as you’ve been used to at the surface. ![]() But when you go into the ocean actually things change much more quickly because of the rapid pressure differences. Unsupported, breathing only air, you could just about climb Everest without any additional support other than your protective clothing. When you look at the stresses this sport places on our physiology, it initially looks almost impossible that anyone should be able to dive to such profound depths – and yet they do. Scientists and those who practise free diving are in many ways utterly alien to one another. I’m a doctor with a special interest in extreme environments, so was intrigued when I was asked to collaborate in an art project about free diving for the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition Somewhere in Between. Champions can hold their breath for extraordinary amounts of time – the record for women is nine minutes, and men 11. Free divers swim to extreme depths underwater (the current record is 214m) without any breathing apparatus. ![]()
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