Search
Related Links




 

 

Informative Articles

2004-05 NBA Season Preview
2004 NBA PREVIEW by Leigh Douglas If there was one single theme to this off-season for the NBA it was ‘change’ not only was there quite a bit of significant player movement, but the league itself underwent a makeover of sorts, finally expanding to...

Fishing Reels - Picking The Right Type
Fish for Reel Being surrounded by nature's beauty can be fun. One can do it at the beach, in a luxury resort or just traveling out of town. Fishing is another good activity one can choose to do to bond more with either family or friends....

Fitness For Golf Is The Key To Rejuvenating Your Golf Game
Fitness for golf is prevalent at every level. You hear about it all the time on the television and even teaching pros are talking more about the importance of fitness for golf. The reason being is the belief that your ‘physical limitations’ are...

MLB notebook for July 13th
Don’t look now, but here comes the old reliables’ (The Yankees and The Braves). In New York, after all the talk of Torre and the coaching staff being on the hot seat, and the team needing to makes this move or that one (this is an all star lineup...

Paintball-One of the Safest sports today!
Paintball One Of The Safest Sports Out There Today. While membership in the "Extreme Sports" category implies a whiff of danger, only Paintball is handicapped by a huge injury taboo--one that exists in the public mind, but not in the statistics....

 
The skin squeeze effect in diving

Skin squeeze is one of the barotrauma problems which divers can suffer due to the pressure factors involved in the practice of the sport. This way, a barotrauma can be caused due to the differences between the pressure of the water and the surface pressure to which the diver's body is adequate and used to. Barotraumas include problems such as external, inner and middle ear squeeze, eye squeeze, skin squeeze, sinus squeeze and lung squeeze.

While being into the water, a diver is in a heavier environment than when he is in the surface due to the fact that water is a denser medium than air. The relationship between the density of the environment, its pressure and the way it affects the human body are explained through several physic laws, among which we can specifically find Boyle's law, Dalton's law and Henry's law.

These physic laws explain that there is a constant relationship among the volume and the pressure multiplication. This way, it explains that the way in which the deeper a diver goes into the water, the more


pressure he will be exposed to. Therefore, whenever they wish to go deep into the water, divers should have this law in mind and take the precautions necessary to avoid the effects which this pressure increase can have on them.

According to Boyle's law, while the pressure of the water increases as we go deeper the volume of the gases decrease. This way, when a diver goes deeper into the water, the air which might exist between his suit and his skin or into his mask would decrease and this could cause him to suffer a skin squeeze.

This way, skin squeeze can happen as a consequence of a change in volume in the air enclosed against the diver's skin. Most of the times, when this happens at an area covered by the diving suit it is called suit squeeze and usually happens to divers who are wearing a dry diving suit and it becomes tight around a specific skin area due to the air volume reduction.

About the Author
Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.divepilot.com. Please visit his website to discover the world of diving!

Sign up for PayPal and start accepting credit card payments instantly.