Rebreather Forum 4, held in 2023 in Malta was yet another Herculean undertaking by Michael Menduno, the executive editor of Global Underwater Explorer’s (aka GUE) InDepth magazine and various international publications (see the above link for details.) Michael was the journalist who coined the term ‘technical diving”, and also created Aquacorp Magazine.
I’ve known and appreciated Michael for decades and gave presentations at his Rebreather Forums 2 and 3. My role on the RF4 Science Panel was to help select the best speakers for the Forum, to herd cats when necessary, and to speak.
The Book
Of course, with a new book (basically a textbook) on one of the most mysterious and technical aspects of rebreather diving, I spoke on the subject of “Demystifying Scrubbers”.
Photo courtesy of Rosemary Lunn
Breakthrough can be found on Amazon in paperback or Kindle, or elsewhere in ePub format.
Photo courtesy of Axel Schoeller (1963-2023)
Presentation Description
Here, I’ve borrowed Menduno’s own words describing my talk.
Plunge into the intricate world of rebreather diving safety and techniques with retired scientific director of the US Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) and author, Dr. John Clarke, who illuminates the inner workings of rebreather CO2 scrubbers, based on extensive research work by the US Navy and his own modeling efforts. This talk unveils the critical aspects of CCR diving gear selection, especially focusing on the importance of rebreather CO2 scrubbers, soda lime quality, and the proper maintenance of canister duration to ensure diver safety.
From the influence of cold water on CCR diving equipment to the vital role of physiological variation among divers, discover how individual differences significantly impact rebreather canister duration and CO2 absorption rates. Engage with real-life scenarios and experiments that shed light on the potential dangers of compromised soda lime; explore the implications of using indicating soda sorb without proper Navy notification (leading to catastrophic failures in rebreather functionality). Moreover, the discussion covers simulated physical models that offer insights into the dynamics of CO2 absorption in rebreather diving. The models emphasize the importance of understanding your CCR diving equipment and recognizing when changes, no matter how slight, in soda lime granule size or distribution might signal a risk. This video is an essential watch for any rebreather diver seeking to deepen their safety knowledge, highlighting the blend of technical expertise, physiological awareness, and practical vigilance required to navigate the underwater world securely.
All of the RF4 presentations are available at this RF4 link. It is chock full of the best information available, from the best presenters in the field of Rebreather Diving.
Just like skeletal muscles, respiratory muscles have a limited ability to respond to respiratory loads. An excellent example of this is a person’s inability to breathe through an overly long snorkel (Figure 1.) Our respiratory muscles simply aren’t strong enough to overcome the pressure difference between water depth and the surface.
This doesn’t work. Her respiratory muscles are not strong enough. Illustration by Cameron Cottrill.
The primary respiratory muscle is the diaphragm, (the brown organ lying below the lungs in Figure 2.) The diaphragm is designed for low-intensity work maintained 24/7 for the entirety of your life.
Like the heart muscle, its specialty is endurance. When called upon to maximally perform, the diaphragm needs assistance.
That assistance is provided by the accessory respiratory muscles, primarily the intercostal muscles linking the ribs within the rib cage.
The human diaphragm separating the lungs from the abdominal cavity. Graphic by John Clarke.
Unless you’re reading this while running on a treadmill, your body is probably idling. Your heart is beating rhythmically, your diaphragm is methodically contracting and relaxing. But, if some dire event were to happen, you would be primed for action. If you needed to react to an emergency, your heart and lungs would race at full speed.
The difference between idling and full-speed capability is called physiological reserve, which in turn is divided into its components; cardiac, muscular, and ventilatory reserve. As drivers, pilots, and boat captains will attest, it’s always good to have fuel reserves. Likewise, physiological reserve is good to have in abundance.
The Dive
The following is an imaginary tale of a young, blond-haired hipster drawn to the Red Sea for a deep dive. He chose to dive on the wall at Ras Mohammed on the Eastern Shore of the Sinai, which descends quickly down to a thousand feet and beyond. That was his target—1,000 feet.
The previous year he bought a rebreather so gas usage should not be a problem for his deep dive. He also sprang for the cost of helium-oxygen diluent. Trimix would have been cheaper, but he spared no expense. Nothing but the best. To that end, he used loose-fill, fine grain Sodalime in his CO2 scrubber canister.
These were his thoughts as he descended.
Free-falling at three hundred feet. Never been this deep before. The water’s getting cold, so the warm gas from the canister feels good.
800 feet. Wow, the gas is thicker now.
When he reached the bottom, he realized something wasn’t right. He sucked harder and harder, feeling his full face mask collapsing around his face with each inhalation. He was “sucking rubber,” feeling like he was running out of gas, but his diluent pressure gage still read 1800 psi.
Unconsciously, he compensated for the respiratory load by slowing his breathing—easing his discomfort. Concerned, he briefly switched to open circuit bailout gas, but that didn’t feel any better. In fact, it was worse, so he switched back to the bag.
Surprisingly, he couldn’t get off the bottom. In fact, he was slipping further downslope. He needed to drop weights, but they were integrated. He fumbled with his vest, trying to remember how to release the weights, but he couldn’t work it out.
He found the pony bottle to inflate his integrated BC, but after a second’s spit of air, it stopped filling. He would have to swim off the bottom. As he struggled to swim upwards in the darkness, and without bubbles to guide him, he wasn’t sure which way was up.
His heart was beating at its maximum rate, trying to force blood through his lungs, but he couldn’t force enough gas in and out of his lungs to clear his bloodstream of its increasingly toxic CO2 load. The build-up of CO2 in the arterial blood was clouding his thinking. The CO2 was making him want to breathe harder, but he couldn’t. The feeling of breathlessness—and impending doom—was overwhelming.
————
The accident investigation on the equipment was inconclusive. The dive computer had flooded, but that was irrelevant. Surface pre-dive checks were passed. The rebreather seemed to function normally when tested in a swimming pool. The investigators convinced a Navy laboratory to press the rebreather down to 1,000 feet, but nothing abnormal was found other than a slight elevation of controlled PO2.
The Analysis
An asthma attack can kill by narrowing the airways in the lung, making the person suffering the attack feel like they’re sucking air through a clogged straw.
A healthy diver doesn’t have airways that constrict, but gas density increases with depth, causing the same effect as a narrowed airway. It becomes increasingly difficult to breathe as depth increases. A previous InDepth blogpost on gas density discusses this subject.
Normal human airways compared to airways during an asthma attack. Graphic courtesy of Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
If the strength of respiratory muscles is finite, just as it is for all muscles, then any load placed on those muscles will eat away a diver’s “respiratory reserve.” From the diaphragm’s perspective, the total loading it encounters is divided between that internal to the diver and that external to the diver. As gas density increases, internal loading increases. A rebreather is external to the body, so flow resistance through a rebreather adds to the total load placed on the respiratory muscles. If the internal resistance load increases a lot, as it does at great depth, there is very little reserve left for external resistance, like that of a rebreather.
In this fictional tale of a hapless diver, he needlessly added respiratory resistance by using fine-grain Sodalime in his scrubber canister. Compared to large grain Sodalime, such as Sofnolime 408, fine-grain absorbent adds scrubber duration, but it also increases breathing resistance. It thus cut into the diver’s ventilatory reserve.
This fictional diver exceeded his physiological reserves by,
not understanding the effect of dense gas on the “work of breathing,”
not understanding the limitation of his respiratory muscles, and
by not realizing the “best” Sodalime for dive duration was not the best for breathing resistance.
He also didn’t realize that a rebreather scrubber might remove all CO2 from the expired gas passing through it, but it is ventilation (breathing) that eliminates the body’s CO2 from the diver’s bloodstream. Once CO2 intoxication begins, cognitive and muscular ability quickly decline to the point where self-rescue may be impossible.
Lessons from The U.S. Navy
Considering the seriousness of the topic, it is worthwhile to review the following figures prepared for the U.S. Navy.
First, we define peak-to-peak mouth pressure, a measure of the pressure exerted by a working diver breathing through the external resistance of a rebreather. Total respiratory resistance for a diver comes in two parts: internal and external. In the following figures, those resistances in the upper airways are symbolized by a small opening, and in the external breathing apparatus, by a long, narrow opening representing a UBA attached to the diver’s mouth.
High external resistance. In this case, the difference between mouth pressure and ambient water pressure is called ΔP1 Credit with modifcation: “Direct measurement of pressures involved in vocal exercises using semi-occluded vocal tracts”.Low external resistance. The difference between mouth pressure and ambient water pressure is called ΔP2. Credit with modification: “Direct measurement of pressures involved in vocal exercises using semi-occluded vocal tracts”.Mouth pressure waveforms ΔP1 and ΔP2 during breathing with high (P1) and low (P2) external resistance.
This author reviewed over 250 dives by Navy divers at the Naval Medical Research Institute and the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. These were working dives involving strenuous exercise at simulated depths down to 1500 feet seawater, using gas mixtures ranging from air to nitrox and heliox. Gas densities ranged from about 1 gram per liter (g/L) (air at the surface) to over 8 g/L. Each dive was composed of a team of divers, so each plotted data point had more than one man-dive result included. An “eventful” dive was one where a diver stopped work due to loss of consciousness, or respiratory distress (“dyspnea” in medical terminology.) They were marked as red in the following figure. Uneventful dives were marked in black.
Using a statistical technique called maximum likelihood, the data revealed a sloping line marking a boundary between eventful and uneventful dives.
Peak-to-peak mouth pressure and gas density conspire to increase a diver’s risk of an “event” during a dive.
The fact that the zero-incidence line sloped downward illustrates the fact that the higher the gas density, the greater the respiratory load imposed on a diver by both internal and external (UBA) resistance. The higher that load, the lower the diver’s tolerance to high respiratory pressures.
By measuring peak-to-peak mouth pressures, we are witnessing the effect of UBA flow resistance at high workloads. It does not reveal the flow resistance internal to the body. However, when gas density increases, internal resistance must also increase.
The interrupted lines in the figure illustrate lines of estimated equal probability of an event. The higher the peak-to- peak pressure for a given gas density, the higher the probability of an eventful dive.
Figure 7 suggests that at a gas density of over 8 grams per liter, practical work would be impossible. The only way to make it possible would be to reduce gas density by substituting helium for nitrogen, or substituting hydrogen for helium, and then doing as little work as possible to keep ΔP low.
For our fictional 1,000 foot diver, the gas density would have been between 6 and 7 grams per L. Using a rebreather, there would be virtually no physiological reserve at the bottom. Moderate work against the high breathing resistance at depth would be very likely to result in an “eventful” dive.
Image Citation for medical graphics: Robieux C, Galant C, Lagier A, Legou T, Giovanni A. Direct measurement of pressures involved in vocal exercises using semi-occluded vocal tracts. Logoped Phoniatr Vocol. 2015 Oct;40(3):106-12. doi: 10.3109/14015439.2014.902496. Epub 2014 May 21. PMID: 24850270.
John Clarke, also known as John R. Clarke, Ph.D., is a Navy diving researcher in physiology and physical science. Clarke was an early graduate of the Navy’s Scientist in the Sea Program.During his forty-year governmentcareer, he conducted physiological research onnumerous experimental saturation dives. Two dives were to a pressure equivalent to 1500 fsw.
For twenty- eight years he was the Scientific Director of the Navy Experimental Diving Unit.
Clarke has authored a technothriller-science fiction series called the Jason Parker Trilogy. All three volumes, Middle Waters, Triangle, and Atmosphere, feature saturation diving from depths of 100 feet to 2,500 feet. The deepest dives involve hydreliox, a mixture of helium, hydrogen and oxygen. UFOs, aliens, and an uncaring cosmos lay the framework for political and human intrigue both on and off-planet.
Although now retired, Clarke has worked for NEDU as a Scientist Emeritus. He now runs a consulting company, Clarke Life Support Consulting, LLC. He helps various companies, when he isn’t writing about diving, aviation, and space. His websites are www.johnclarkeonline.com and www.jasonparkertrilogy.com. His thriller series is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Related Blog Posts – Further Reading for Rebreather Divers
Dead Space is a defunct, or shall we simply say “dead,” survival horror game that enthralled computer game players from 2008 to at least 2013. Sadly, the company that designed the horrifically beautiful game, Visceral Games, is no more. It has been, so to speak, eviscerated.
The main protagonist of the Dead Space Series was Isaac Clarke. If I was a game player I think I would be an Isaac fan since he was one of those rare Clarke’s known as a “corpse-slaying badass.” If in some unforeseen future my survival depended on being such a slayer, I’d want to be badass about it too, just like Isaac. As they say, anything worth doing …
Isaac Clarke and his Dead Space world make a great segue to introduce another matter of personal survival. And that is DEAD SPACE in underwater breathing equipment.
Clarke has proven to be equally at home underwater and in space due to his interesting cyan-lighted helmet. (I’m not sure where his eyes are, but perhaps in the 26th century a multi-frequency sensor suite makes a simple pair of eyes redundant.)
Historically, the U.S Navy used the venerable MK 5 diving helmet and the MK 12 diving helmet, which although they had no sensor suites, at least allowed divers to work at fairly great depths without drowning. However, they shared a common problem: Dead Space.
In ventilation terms, dead space is a gas volume that impedes the transfer of carbon dioxide (CO2) from a diver or snorkeler’s breath. When we exhale through any breathing device, hose, tube, or one-way valve we expect that exhaled breath to be removed completely, not hanging around to be re-inhaled with the next breath.
But a diving helmet inevitably has a large dead space. The only way to flush out the exhaled CO2 is by flowing a great deal of fresh gas through that helmet. A flow of up to six cubic feet of gas per minute is sometimes needed to mix and remove the diver’s exhaled breath from a diving helmet like the MK 12.
In more modern helmets, the dead space has been reduced by having the diver wear an oral-nasal mask inside the diving helmet, and giving the diver gas only on inhalation using a demand regulator like that used in scuba diving. The famous series of Kirby Morgan helmets, arguably the most popular in the world, is an example of such modern helmets.
Full face masks are used when light weight and agility is required, as in public service diving, cold water diving, or in Special Forces operations. The design of full face masks (FFM) has evolved through the years to favor small dead space, for all the reasons explained above.
Erich C. Frandrup’s 2003 Master’s Thesis for Duke’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science reported on research on a simple breathing apparatus, snorkels. You can’t get much simpler than that.
Frandrup confirmed quantitatively what many of us knew qualitatively. Snorkels are by design low breathing resistance, and low dead space devices. Happily, the dead space can be easily calculated, as simply the volume contained within the snorkel.
Surprisingly, some snorkel manufacturers have recently sought to improve upon a great thing by modifying snorkels, combining them with a full face mask. The Navy has not studied those modified snorkels since Navy divers don’t use snorkels. However, you don’t get something for nothing. If you add a full face mask to a snorkel, dead space has to increase, even when using an oral-nasal mask.
So what?
In 1995 Dan Warkander and Claus Lundgren compared the dead space of common diving equipment, including full face masks, and reported on increases both in diver ventilation and the maximum amount of CO2 in the diver’s lungs. Basically the physiological effects of dead space goes like this: we naturally produce CO2 during the process of “burning” fuel, just like a car engine does. (Of course our fuel is glucose, not gasoline.) The more we work, the more CO2 we produce in our blood, and the more we have to breathe (ventilate) to expel that CO2 out of our bodies.
If we are exhaling into a dead space, some of that exhaled CO2 will be inhaled into our lungs during our next breath. That’s not good, because now we have to breathe harder to expel both the produced CO2 and the reinhaled CO2. In other words, dead space makes us breathe harder.
Now, if we’re breathing through an underwater breathing apparatus, hard breathing is, well, hard. As a result, we tend to get a little lazy and allow CO2 to build up in the blood stream. And if that CO2 get high enough, it’s lights out for us. Underwater, the lights are likely to stay out.
In a computer game like Dead Space, no one worries about helmet dead space. But if a movie is ever based on the game, whichever actor plays Isaac Clarke should be very concerned about the most insidious type of Dead Space, that in his futuristic helmet. It can be (need I say it?) — deadly.
Compared to decompression computers, digital oxygen control, and fuel cell oxygen sensors, carbon dioxide absorbent is low-tech and not at all sexy. Perhaps because it is low in diver interest, it is poorly understood. In rebreather diving, a lack of knowledge is dangerous.
The U.S. Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) is intimately familiar with sodalime, the crystalline carbon dioxide absorbent used in a wide variety of self-contained breathing apparatus for both diving and land use. NEDU routinely tests sodalime during accident investigations, during CO2 scrubber canister duration determinations, or during various research and development tasks. They have developed computer models of scrubber canister kinetics and patented and licensed technology for use in determining how long a scrubber will last in diving and land applications.
The types of sodalime in NEDU’s experimental inventory are:
Sofnolime 408 Mesh NI L Grade
Sofnolime 812 Mesh NI D Grade
HP Sodasorb (4/8 Reg HP)
Dragersorb 400
Limepak
Micropore
Absorbent undergoes a battery of quality tests at NEDU, most of them in accordance with NATO standardized testing procedures (STANAG 1411). One test is of the distribution of sodalime granule sizes, and another tests the softness or friability of the granules. One test checks the moisture content of the sample, and another tests the CO2 absorption ability of a small sample of absorbent.
The lead photo is a sample bag of sodalime removed from absorbent buckets, awaiting testing.
From time to time, absorbent lot samples fail one or more of these tests. One failure of granule size distribution was caused by changes in production procedures. “Worms” of absorbent rather than granules of absorbent started showing up in sodalime pails. In another case, absorbent was found to have substandard absorption activity, and in yet another, the material was too soft. Too soft or friable material can allow granules to break down, turning into dust.
This would not be a major problem, except that a diver or miner has to breathe through his granular absorbent bed, and dust clogs that bed, making breathing difficult. In the extreme, labored breathing from unusually high dust loading can result in unconsciousness.
What does the above have to do with this post’s title?
Supposedly, the maxim “Trust in God, but keep your powder dry” was uttered by Oliver Cromwell, but first appeared in 1834 in the poem “Oliver’s Advice” by William Blacker with the words “Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!” If indeed Cromwell did say it, then it dates from the 1600s.
A much more modern interpretation, appropriate for rebreather divers, is as follows: buckets of sodalime with a larger than usual layer of dust at the bottom (due to the mechanical breakdown of absorbent granules during shipment), should be kept dry. In other words, don’t dive it!
Micropore rolled carbon dioxide absorbent on the right, granular absorbent on the left.
Presumably, this is not an issue with Micropore ExtendAir CO2 absorbent since it’s basically sodalime powder suspended on a plastic medium. The diver breathes through fixed channels in the ExtendAir cartridge, not through the powder.
Considering the relatively high cost of granular sodalime, a diver might be very reluctant to discard an entire bucket of absorbent with a non-quantifiable amount of dusting. They certainly will not be performing sieve tests for granule size distributions like NEDU, however, one simple solution to a suspected dusting problem might be to sieve the material before diving it. The only requirement would be that only the dust should be discarded, not whole granules. In other words, your sieve must have a fine mesh.
In NEDU’s experience, quality control issues are not necessarily a problem with manufacturing. Where and how sodalime is stored can apparently have an appreciable effect on sodalime hardness. The same lot of sodalime stored in two different but close proximity locations has been found to differ markedly in its friability. Exactly why that should be, is presently unknown.
Regardless of whether the subject is sexy or not, a wise rebreather diver will seek all the knowledge available for his “sorb”, as it’s sometimes called. After all, the coolest decompression computer in the world will do you no good at all if you’re unconscious on the bottom because you tried to outlast your CO2 absorbent.
Most rebreather divers start off their diving career with open-circuit diving; that is, with scuba. And some of them pick up bad habits. I happen to be one of those divers.
With scuba you start the dive with a very limited amount of air in your scuba bottle. New divers are typically anxious, breathe harder than they have to, and blow through their air supply fairly quickly. More experienced divers are relaxed and enjoy the dive without anxiety, and thus their air bottles last longer than they do with novice divers.
So early in a diver’s experience he comes to associate air conservation with a sign of diver experience and maturity. When you are relaxed and physically fit, and your swimming is efficient, your breathing may become extraordinarily slow. Some call it skip breathing — holding your breath between inhalations.
I was once swimming among the ruins of Herod’s Port in Caesarea, and my dive buddy was a Navy SEAL. I started the dive under-weighted, so I picked up a 2000 year old piece of rubble and carried it around with me as ballast. In spite of the very inefficient style of swimming which resulted, my air supply still lasted longer than that of my SEAL buddy.
At first I was annoyed that I had to end the dive prematurely, but then I began to feel somewhat smug. I had used less air than a frogman.
As a physiologist I knew that I may well have been unconsciously skip breathing, which would have raised my arterial carbon dioxide level, potentially to a dangerous level. But all ended well, and I could not help being glad that I was not the one to call the dive.
It is important for rebreather divers to understand that they don’t have to be breathing elevated levels of carbon dioxide to run into physiological problems with carbon dioxide. It’s the carbon dioxide in your arterial blood that matters. It can render you unconscious even when you’re breathing gas with no carbon dioxide at all.
MK 16 rebreather diver
Normally the body automatically ensures that as you work harder, and produce more carbon dioxide in your blood stream, that you breathe more, forcing that CO2 out of your blood, into the lungs, and out through your mouth. It works like an air conditioner thermostat; the hotter it gets in the house, the more heat is pumped outside. In other words, arterial and alveolar CO2 levels are controlled by automatic changes in ventilation (breathing.) In fact you can predict alveolar levels of CO2 by taking the rate at which CO2 is being produced by the body and dividing it by the ventilation rate. This relationship is called the Alveolar Ventilation Equation, or in clinical circles, the PCO2 Equation.
Normally, CO2 production and ventilation is tightly controlled so that normal alveolar and arterial CO2 is about 40 mmHg, mmHg being a unit of so-called partial pressure. 40 mmHg of arterial CO2 is safe. [One standard atmosphere of pressure is 760 mmHg, so ignoring the partial pressure of water vapor and other gases, a partial pressure of 40 mmHg of CO2 is equivalent to exhaling about 5% carbon dioxide.]
When a diver is working hard while breathing through a breathing resistance like a rebreather, as ventilation increases respiratory discomfort goes up as well. For most people, when the respiratory discomfort gets too high, they quit working and take a”breather”. But there are some divers who hate respiratory discomfort, and don’t mind high levels of arterial CO2. We call these people CO2 retainers.
Navy experimental deep sea divers; photo credit: Frank Stout
As an example, I once had as an experimental subject a physically fit Navy diver at the Naval Medical Research Institute during a study of respiratory loading. The test was conducted in a dry hyperbaric chamber under the same pressure as that at 300 feet of sea water. The experimental setup in the chamber looked somewhat like that in the figure to the right although the diver I’m talking about is not in this photo.
The diver was exercising on the bicycle ergometer while breathing through a controlled respiratory resistance at 300 feet in a helium atmosphere. The diver quickly learned that by double breathing, starting an inspiration, stopping it, then restarting, he could confuse the circuitry controlling the test equipment, thus eliminating the high respiratory loading.
As he played these breathing pattern games my technician was monitoring a mass spectrometer which was telling us how high his expired CO2 concentration was going. The exhaled CO2 started creeping up, and I warned him that he needed to cut out the tricky breathing or I’d have to abort the run.
The clever but manipulative diver would obey my command for a minute or so, and then go back to his erratic breathing. He joked about how he was tricking the experiment and how he felt fine in spite of the high CO2 readings.
That was a mistake.
When you’re talking, you’re not breathing. Since his breathing was already marginal, his end-tidal CO2, an estimate of alveolar CO2, shot up in a matter of seconds from 60 to 70 and then 90 mmHg, over twice what it should have been. When my technician told me the diver’s exhaled CO2 was at 90 mmHg, I yelled “Abort the run”. But the diver never heard that command. He was already unconscious and falling off the bike on his way to the hard metal decking inside the hyperbaric chamber.
The diver thought he was tricking the experiment, but in fact he was tricking himself. Although he felt comfortable skip breathing, he was rapidly pedaling towards a hard lesson in the toxicity of carbon dioxide.
Keep in mind, this diver was breathing virtually no carbon dioxide. His body was producing it because of his high work level, and he was simply not breathing enough to remove it from his body.
In upcoming posts we’ll look at what happens when inspired CO2 starts to rise, for instance due to the failure of a carbon dioxide scrubber canister in a rebreather. I already gave you one example in the CO2 rebreathing study of my first post in this series. There’s lots more to come.
Of all the gases humans excrete, the most bountiful, and arguably the most deadly, is exhaled carbon dioxide.
There is a forgotten bit of American medical history that reveals the bizarre features of the toxicity of carbon dioxide. In 1926, before the advent of modern psychiatric medications, some American psychiatrists began experimenting with the use of inhaled carbon dioxide for the treatment of schizophrenia and psychoses. At the time, there were no effective treatments other than electroshock.
Dr Ladislas J. Meduna
One of the most successful of these researchers was Dr Ladislas J. Meduna, a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago.
High levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) did in fact have some success in treating schizophrenia, but it also produced Out of Body (OBE) and seemingly spiritual experiences. The following text is quoted from a book called Carbon Dioxide Therapy. A Neurophysiological Treatment of Nervous Disorders, published in 1950 and authored by Meduna.Meduna administered by mask between 20 and 30 breaths of a gas mixture of 30% CO2, 70% O2. From pg. 22 of his book we find,
“Any attempt to define the sensory phenomena during CO2 anesthesia, in terms of dream, hallucination, illusions, etc., would be futile. The actual material would support any hypothesis. Some of the sensory phenomena would direct us to define them as hallucinations. Some of these phenomena are felt by the patients as “real dreams”; others obviously are dreamy repetitions of real events in the past or of past dreams. I believe therefore that any classification of these phenomena in terms of dream or hallucination would be not only meaningless, but directly misleading; the patient is not “sleeping” in the physiological sense, nor is he in the state of consciousness which we usually assume to be present in true hypnagogic hallucinations.”
click to enlarge
“One subject, after 20 respirations of the gas, reported seeing a “bright light, like the sun.”
“It was a wonderful feeling. It was marvelous. I felt very light and didn’t know where I was. For a moment I thought: ‘Now isn’t that funny. I am right here and I don’t know whether I am dreaming or not.’ And then I thought that something was happening to me. This wasn’t at night. I was not dreaming. And then it felt as if there were a space of time when I knew something had happened to me and I wasn’t sure what it was. And then I felt a wonderful feeling as if I was out in space.”
“After the second breath” — reported a 29 year-old healthy female nurse who had taken a treatment – “came an onrush of color… then the colors left and I felt myself being separated; my soul drawing apart from the physical being, was drawn upward seemingly to leave the earth and to go upward where it reached a greater Spirit with Whom there was a communion, producing a remarkable, new relaxation and deep security. Through this communion I seemed to receive assurance that the petite problems or whatever was bothering the human being that was me huddled down on the earth, would work out all right and that I had no need to worry.”
“In this spirituelle I felt the Greater Spirit even smiling indulgently upon me in my vain little efforts to carry on by myself and I pressed close the warmth and tender strength and felt assurance of enough power to overcome whatever lay ahead for me as a human being.”
Meduna summarized that preceding case by stating, “In this beautiful experience we can discern almost all the constants of the CO2 experience: (1) color; (2) geometric patterns; (3) movement; (4) doubleness of personality; and (5) divination or feelings of esoteric importance.”
Meduna went on to admit that “Not all of the sensory phenomena experienced by the patients are of celestial beauty and serenity. Some of them are horrifying beyond description.”
In 1971, Chris Lambertsen, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and considered to be the father of special warfare diving by Navy SEALS, published a careful examination of the physiological consequences of the Meduna mixture. He found that inhalation of 30% CO2 in oxygen would cause unconsciousness and convulsions within 1-3 min. The precipitating event for loss of consciousness seemed to be a catastrophic increase in the acidity of the blood due to the large amount of carbonic acid produced by the CO2 inhalation. This raises the possibility that the experiences noted by Meduna were caused by pre-convulsive events within the brain.
Since then the medical community has deemed carbon dioxide “treatments” as not only dangerous but ineffective compared to modern psychiatric medication. Meduna’s mixture is no longer used.
While at the Naval Medical Research Institute, I was my own research subject in a study of the effects of rebreathing CO2 concentrations up to 8%. That was a carbon dioxide concentration that some Navy SEALS had claimed could be tolerated without impairment.
The simplest scrubber canister in the simplest rebreather, Ocenco M20.2
I was not under water, but riding a stationary bicycle ergometer in the laboratory, simulating breathing on a closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus (in diving vernacular, a rebreather.) Although oxygen was being added as I consumed it, there was no carbon dioxide scrubber (a container of carbon dioxide absorbing material), so the test was examining what happens when a scrubber canister is no longer functioning properly. At 7% inspired CO2 I stopped the exercise, feeling a little abnormal. However, I was surprised at how unimpaired I seemed to be; that was, until I attempted to dismount the ergometer. I almost fell and needed help removing myself from the bicycle to a chair.
The single-minded and simple-minded task of exercising had hidden a growing central nervous system impairment. Like someone intoxicated with alcohol, I could not judge my level of impairment until a task requiring some coordination was required.
So we see that high levels of carbon dioxide intoxication can lead to profound disturbances of the central nervous system. In upcoming posts we’ll see how elevated carbon dioxide levels and the control of respiratory ventilation can interact to put rebreather divers at risk.
Much of the above is from a nonfiction book project currently under review. The working title for the book is “Collected Tales of the Spiritual and Paranormal.”
When I first saw images from NASA’s various Mars rovers, I was almost crawling out of my skin with excitement. As I spoke at a NASA sponsored conference where scientists and engineers were discussing plans for a Mars mission and colonization, I was enthralled with the thought that humans are actually planning for mankind to leave our planet for a foreign world.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I would miss if I were a colonist on Mars. I’ve decided, what I would miss the most is something we take for granted in most places of the world; water.
Of course, Martian pioneers would have to have abundant stockpiles of drinking water. But I sure would miss Earth’s oceans; their awe inspiring breadth and depth, their multitudes of sea life, and the gentle shades of blue-green in clear water along sandy coasts.
I would miss the sound of the surf, the laughter of children chasing and being chased by harmless but persistent waves.
I would miss the sound of clicking shrimp, and the clicking of dolphins corralling schools of fish.
I would miss being able to open the windows on a perfect day. I would miss feeling a breeze on my bare face.
I would miss never having to wonder if I had enough oxygen to breathe. I’d miss not worrying that toxic carbon dioxide would seep into my tiny house and suffocate me and my family in our sleep, or that my home’s pressure barrier would fail and our blood would essentially boil, releasing a flood of deadly bubbles stopping our hearts.
I am concerned that those attempting to colonize Mars woud sink into a chronic melancholy simply because the water that pleases and sustains so many of us is absent on Mars. Could these homesick astronauts survive, and even thrive?
If the first wave of colonizers did survive, procreate, and nurture the next generation, the first generation of true Martians, then I suspect that generation would fare much better psychologically than the first. After all, they would never have known the verdant forests and splendorous seas of Earth.
As I pondered what it would be like to be a third and fourth generation colonist on Mars, growing up knowing nothing else, I realized that rather than space exploration being a guaranteed and common place activity at that time in the not too distant future, a bleaker possibility exists.
It is entirely possible that war, disease, asteroid and comet collisions, or even the failure of mismanaged banking systems could so impoverish the Earth that space travel to the Martian colony might not remain economically sustainable. Eventually, to the stranded Martians our Earth could be little more than a distant memory, perhaps even a legend. Martian children might grow up on the red planet hearing tales of Sky People who came to Mars from a far away place, a world of indescribable beauty, with colors of blue and green that are not even imaginable on Mars.
Some native Americans have in the past recounted tales of Sky People coming to Earth. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the next generation of Earthlings becomes the fabled Sky People that populate the planet Mars?
If offered the chance to be one of those Sky People on a one-way trip to Mars, would I sign up for the mission? Frankly I don’t think I could leave the most beautiful planet in the solar system, perhaps in the galaxy, even for something as exotic as a trip to Mars.
Compared to the previously posted video of a segment of a rebreather scrubber, this video shows a much larger, and therefore more realistic scrubber with axially aligned, CO2 rich gas flow passing from left to right. Due to the larger size of the simulation space, more widely distributed heat patterns are noticeable, as are fluctuations in heat. The flow of those fluctuations are most noticeable along the simulated boundary of the cylindrical scrubber bed.
The assumptions of this simulation are that CO2 production (diver workload) is constant throughout the simulation run, ventilatory flow through the canister is constant, the surrounding water temperature is constant at 50° F, and the canister was chilled to the water temperature before the “diver” started breathing through it.
The previous simulation conditions were similar except that the canister was toasty warm prior to immersion in frigid water.
To fully appreciate the fine detail of the imagery, click on the video frame then expand the video to full screen size (lower right symbol immediately after “You Tube”) and play back in 1080p High Definition mode.
If you’re diving a rebreather (closed-circuit breathing apparatus to be exact), then you know the scrubber removes carbon dioxide from your recirculated breath. Without the scrubber working, you’d go unconscious from carbon dioxide intoxication within a very few minutes of starting the dive.
But do you really know what’s going on inside that scrubber canister?
A stochastic computer simulation developed by the author gives as realistic a glimpse inside as we can get.
Loose granular and rolled sodalime. Click to enlarge.
Carbon dioxide scrubber canisters usually contain a chemical mixture called sodalime that chemically reacts with carbon dioxide in a diver’s expired breath. That material may be in granular form, or in a preformed roll. Sodalime is a mixture of calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide, which when it reacts by absorbing carbon dioxide is converted into calcium carbonate (CaCO3, calcite), a major constituent of limestone.
The overall chemical reaction can be simplified to:
CO2 + Ca(OH)2 → CaCO3 + H2O + heat
In the following sequence of images we see a rectangular prism shaped scrubber canister arranged axially such that the diver’s expired breath enters the section from the left, passing completely through the canister section before exiting to the right. A portion of the canister was cut away digitally after the simulation was run to allow visualization of temperatures within the canister interior.
Beginning of the simulation. Click to enlarge.
Initially, the canister is at room temperature, and then is immersed in cold water as the diver begins his dive. Temperature is color coded: the coldest temperature is black, and increasing warmth is portrayed in an intuitive fashion from purple to red to yellow, and finally white, being the highest temperature.
In the first image, CO2 has just started reacting with the sodalime at the entrance to the canister section, with a slight heating resulting. Thermal conduction is cooling the exterior surface of the canister, but most of the inside still remains at room temperature.
In the second image, the reaction front has clearly formed, and the hottest portion of the canister has begun moving downstream. Convection carries heat rapidly downstream to heat the diver’s inspired breath, and is seen to offset canister cooling due to conduction from the surrounding cold water.
Click to enlarge
In the image to the left, the heating front is fully developed, and residual heat has spread almost completely throughout the downstream portion of the canister.
In the next image, to the right, the front is beginning to weaken in intensity.
Finally (lower left figure), the thermal heating in the reaction front, indicative of CO2 absorption effectiveness, is fading out, and the cooling of the canister from the surrounding cold water is beginning to win the tug of war between heat generation and conductive cooling.
At that point in time, the canister is spent, and essentially all of the exhaled CO2 is passing right through the canister without being absorbed. If the diver had not ended his dive before his canister reached this point, he would be at great risk of passing out due to CO2 accumulation.
The last figure (lower right) shows temperature readings at various locations, and at various times (reps) throughout the simulation run. The orange and brown traces marked “temp” are measured temperatures from locations near the entrance to the canister. They rise abruptly as the absorption reactions start, and fall quickly as the reaction front moves past them, downstream.
Click to enlarge
The curves that remain elevated longer represent the average exhaled gas temperature, and the average temperature within the absorbent bed. After reaching a peak, the average bed temperature steadily drops as cold gas from the inlet (exhaled) gas chills the portion of the bed behind the reaction front. Exhaled gas temperature, on the other hand, climbs more slowly, but remains more stable until the bed becomes depleted of absorbent activity.
The monitoring of absorbent canister temperature changes is what makes the rebreather scrubber canister monitors used in the Inspiration and Sentinel rebreathers possible. The Sentinel technology is licensed from the U.S. Navy Experimental Diving Unit.
In the next posting, we’ll see the surprising way that cold canisters fill up with calcium carbonate.
The following is a high definition video of the computer simulation of heat generation and loss in a short cylindrical canister. For best effect go to full screen and 1080p mode.
Further details about the computer simulation involved in the production of these images and video can be found in the paper “Computer Modeling of the Kinetics of CO2 Absorption in Rebreather Scrubber Canisters”, in MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2001 Conference Proceedings, published by the Marine Technology Society; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Oceanic Engineering Society (U.S.); IEEE Xplore (Online service).
Dead Space is a defunct, or shall we simply say “dead,” survival horror game that enthralled computer game players from 2008 to at least 2013. Sadly, the company that designed the horrifically beautiful game, Visceral Games, is no more. It has been, so to speak, eviscerated.
Isaac Clarke and his Dead Space world make a great segue to introduce another matter of personal survival. And that is DEAD SPACE in underwater breathing equipment.
Happily, the dead space can be easily calculated, as simply the volume contained within the snorkel.
