I survived 60 ft and blew my O-ring!

I'm a PADI certified Open Water Diver now! I'm allowed to dive to about 60 ft. I never thought diving would be as dangerous as it is. Not in the sense of getting hurt by marine life or anything (though my friend dave did get pricked by an Indian Walkman, wasn't a pretty sight), but in the sense that diving puts your body under a lot of stress. For instance, there is a limit on how many dives your body can handle in a certain period of time because of the risk of Decompression Sickness (DCS). There are specific rules on how long each dive can be depending on depth, and how long you have to wait before you can dive again.

The scientific reason: Your body absorbs Nitrogen when you are underwater and breathing compressed air unlike when you are on the surface. This nitrogen gets absorbed by your tissues, and there is a danger of the nitrogen basically fizzing out of your body like a can of coke when you go from a deep depth to the surface. In an extreme case, the nitrogen bubbles causing your blood to foam out of you. Pretty gruesome. If you have any of the symptoms of DCS you have to go into a recompression chamber for 3 or 4 days. It actually depends on how deep you go, commercial divers who dive to like 100m for work purposes, have to live in a recompression chamber for 3 months after they are done. It's pretty astonishing what the pressure of water does to you. As little as 10 m of depth puts you at 2 Bar of pressure, double surface pressure. Every 10 m deeper you get another bar of pressure.