I remember seeing The Abyss in a theater, but until today I couldn't recall any plot point from the movie at all. But when I read this, it all came back in crystal clear form, because it was so impressive.
At the end of James Cameron’s 1989 underwater thriller The Abyss, oil rig diver Bud Brigman, played by Ed Harris, dons an experimental diving suit in which instead of air he breathes a special oxygenated liquid. This allows him to avoid the lethal effects of extreme water pressure and descend to the bottom of a deep ocean trench to defuse a nuclear warhead. While certainly a memorable plot device, surely such a technology is pure science fiction, right?
Well, not as much as you might think. The breathing fluid depicted in the film, oxygenated perfluorocarbon, actually exists, and while scenes with the diving suit were filmed with Ed Harris holding his breath, an earlier scene in which a rat is immersed in breathing fluid was filmed for real. While The Abyss is certainly the most famous depiction of liquid breathing, the technology has been experimented with for over a century, and while it might not be quite ready for use in deep-sea diving, it may have lifesaving applications in the field of medicine.
Now that's fascinating! It turns out that experiments with this kind of thing have been going on since shortly after World War I, and mice were breathing liquid for a hour in 1962. By the 1980s, such technology had advanced so that hospital patients benefited from breathing liquid. Read how that happened and why it's important at Today I Found Out.
#TheAbyss #breathing #oxygen