[AR] Re: breathing nitrogen
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2016 23:27:54 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 20 Apr 2016, Edward Wright wrote:
The treacherous thing is one breathes quite normally in N2 but O2 is
missing: sudden collapse and death is likely, without warning...
Not quite without warning, but hypoxia has highly individualized
symptoms which an untrained person may not recognize.
However, this isn't quite your usual case of hypoxia: in pure nitrogen,
the time from possibly-noticeable symptoms to unconsciousness is measured
in seconds. This isn't just a matter of a lower level of blood oxygen,
but of a fairly rapid transition to none at all. (Toward the end of the
transition from air to nitrogen in your lungs, your blood is actually
*losing* its remaining oxygen into the lungs -- diffusion through the lung
wall works both ways.) By the time a trained person might recognize
hypoxia, he's already starting to keel over. So it is effectively without
warning, even if a brief warning might be present in theory.
Henry
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