undrwater
Contributor
how about advanced CCR for the sci-fi effect? new scrubber material?
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Any environment like you describe would have to be pressurized, (depressurized?), to make it liveable. Think of 1 atm military subs. The submariners live on those things for months at some serious depths, but they do it all at normal atmospheric pressure.
Another thing you could look into are saturation divers. Those guys basically live at depth under pressure and breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen. They also venture out in suits to do their work. They don't go anywhere near as deep as you are talking about though.
For depths of 1 mile you would need a pressurized environment and pressurized suits. Both do exist though.
JIM suit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As far as a decompression accident from that kind of depth goes, you might need to get creative. 1 mile deep is freakishly out of the range of normal diving. A diver at those depths would either be in a pressurized environment or he would be using some extremely exotic diving methods that would probably involve breathing liquids.
To my knowledge there's also little information we have on the science of living at depth for those lengths of time. If you ever needed to surface your body might react in a way a mountain climber experiences a lack of oxygen on Mt. Everest. It would probably feel like you're living in a space like vacuum because of all the additional air and gas you've now become used to having for intake. You're looking at living 150+ atmosphere's below water at that point (1mi), space is only a 1 atmosphere change.I am not aware of any reason you can not live at the ambient pressure 1 mile down for years. It would take a long time to ascend/deco, but not ridiculously long. Eventually your tissue becomes saturated with whatever inert has your breathing. Commercial divers do saturation dives frequently. Once you reach saturation, your decompression time does not increase.
To my knowledge there's also little information we have on the science of living at depth for those lengths of time. If you ever needed to surface your body might react in a way a mountain climber experiences a lack of oxygen on Mt. Everest. It would probably feel like you're living in a space like vacuum because of all the additional air and gas you've now become used to having for intake. You're looking at living 150+ atmosphere's below water at that point (1mi), space is only a 1 atmosphere change.