Aqua-Adventures (Part 2)

Stop! If you haven’t read Aqua-Adventures (Part 1) yet, please do so before proceeding. It's imperative, otherwise you run the risk of not knowing certain terms.

In Part 1 we learned about buoyancy, air and water density, and air spaces of the body and how they’re effected by the surrounding pressure. Now...

SALT & FRESH WATER

My dives, so far, were all in fresh water, and I had twenty-eight pounds of lead weights strapped around my waist to help control my buoyancy. Otherwise I would remain positively buoyant and would not be able to submerge. But, If I wore all the same gear in salt water, I would need some more lead around my waist. This is because salt water is more dense than fresh. What I am working up to here is that, if Aquaman can swim, say...100mph in salt water, their will be no-o-o-o keeping up with him in fresh water.

UNDERWATER CLARITY AND COLORS

Don't believe everything you see in the comics. Take the color for example. The first forty-nine issues of Aquaman, Colorist Tom McCraw used bright colors under water. Although, not accurate at most underwater sights, I'm glad he did for a "larger that life" feel. But the truth is more like the colors of Aquaman's fiftieth issue done by a Richard and Tanya Horie. It's a little darker.

Clarity underwater is pretty poor unless you are in the tropics, but even then, depth plays a certain factor on color. The majority of my time underwater I could only see about fifteen, maybe twenty feet. But, when I went to about forty-five feet the visibility went to about five to seven feet. Colors play a big factor in this. Some light reflects off the water's surface, some gets scattered by particles in the water, and still some gets absorbed into the water itself, but it doesn't go uniformly. The colors slowly dissipate one at a time. Red is the first to go, followed by orange, yellow, green, then blue. Although underwater life is often full of colors, it can't fully be appreciated unless you bring a light of your own.

On a personal note, at about twenty-five or thirty feet, the red was practically gone. Everybody looked like they were drained of blood; their faces were a ghostly white.

VISUAL TID-BIT

If anybody you know ever goes underwater or sees something underwater, for instance at the aquarium, and they say that they saw a fish that was, say, four feet long, they are probably unknowingly exaggerating. This is because objects underwater appear to be twenty-five percent bigger and closer than they actually are.

HEAT LOSS

Did you ever go to the beach when the news said the ocean temperature was about the same as the surrounding air, but yet still got cold after being in the water for a while? That's because water conducts heat away from your body twenty percent faster that the air does. Also, when you go deeper there can be a thermocline. A thermocline is a cold water layer. It's not a gradual transition; it's a wall of cold. When you go through one, you know it. We hit one at about forty feet, and it's a dramatic temperature drop.

DECOMPRESSION SICKNESS (A.K.A. THE BENDS)

When diving, the S.C.U.B.A. tank is filled with compressed air, made up of a fine mix of twenty-one percent oxygen and seventy-nine percent nitrogen. The main reason for this is that oxygen can become toxic at certain amounts and pressures, this is where the blending of nitrogen comes into play. The problem with this is that the nitrogen doesn't work it's way out of the body as easily as oxygen. The deeper you dive the more nitrogen you take in. Their are special tables you must follow or you run the risk of decompression sickness. This is caused by remaining under water too long at certain depths, and the excess nitrogen will form bubbles in you blood vessels and tissues. Then when you ascend, it's like opening a bottle of soda, except the bubbles have no where to go. The reason that this in known as "The Bends" is because the bubbles form in the joints, like the elbows, leaving your arm in a constant "bent" position. To rid a diver of this often painful predicament of the bends, he or she must be repressurized in a recompression chamber for hours upon hours. And word has it that it cost several thousand dollars for one night.

The timing couldn't have been better for JLA #24. This is where the writer has heard of the term, but only has a partial understanding. The classic analogy of right church, wrong pew. In this issue, Aquaman, in order to save Green Lantern, had to ascend from a great depth very quickly, and in doing so got the bends. I appreciate the writers irony giving Aquaman the bends, but he is working on hypothesis only. Eventhough we really don't know what Aquaman breaths, after all he is fictitious, we can pretty much rule out nitrogen. Read on...

NITROGEN NARCOSIS

While breathing at depth approaching 100 feet, one can experience an effect called Nitrogen Narcosis. The deeper you go the more pronounced this feeling becomes. What does it do? Physically, nothing, but mentally a diver behaves like he or she is intoxicated. These effects can be fatal as the effected looses all rational thought. But this effect can go away as quickly as it comes simply by ascending to shallower water. It's pretty safe to say that Atlantis is very deep and if the Atlantians breathed nitrogen at that depth, it be one hell of a party town down there.

Just remember that what you read here is not instructions for diving. There is a lot more to learn, and I'm not qualified to teach. This, instead is just to show you how different these two worlds really are, and the next time you read an underwater story, you'll be able to spot the mistakes.

-Wallace "Wally" Frost

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