Into the Abyss
From the Independant photo by Rob Brooks
Has the liquid breathing of Sci-Fi become reality
Into the abyss: The diving suit that turns men into fish
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Humans have proven themselves remarkably adept at learning to do what other animals can do naturally. We have taught ourselves to fly like birds, climb like monkeys and burrow like moles. But the one animal that has always proven beyond our reach is the fish.
The invention of scuba diving has allowed us to breathe underwater but only at very shallow depths.
Thanks to our inability to conquer the bends, diving below 70m still remains astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts. Ultra-deep diving is so lethal that more people have walked on the moon than descended below 240m using scuba gear.
Now an inventor in the United States believes he has solved the riddle of how to get humans down to serious depths – by getting us to breathe liquid like fish.
Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.
The idea immediately conjures up the terrifying spectre of drowning but our lungs are more than capable of taking oxygen from a solution.
Read the rest of the story at the The Independant
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