Free diver drops 65 feet into ocean to see at what point he will 'start sinking'

The sea is dark and deep and holds secrets which mankind hasn't been able to uncover till today. Free diving is one such skill where divers have defied the rules of the sea. No breathing equipment is used and instead, the diver relies on breath-holding before he resurfaces from the water. They can hold their breath for more than 10 minutes.

One free diver has explained the physics behind it in a Reddit video which has gone viral. He says there is a point in the sea from which humans can no longer come back to the surface.

As you go deeper into the sea, the pressure increases, and this pressure has strange effects on the human body.

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The Reddit video shows the man holding a lifeline rope. A bubble reads, "At what depth do I start sinking underwater?"

The video shows him at different depths, with the rope being a point of reference. At 16ft underwater, he can be seen floating and rising to the surface. Not much changes by 32ft, except he can do the same a "little less".

He is "perfectly neutral" at 40 feet, but at 50 feet, the freediver starts to sink.

The rate of falling down increases at 65ft.

This is all because of the increasing pressure as you go deeper.

Effect of increasing pressure in deep sea on human body

In a 2018 article for The Conversation, Dr Kevin Fong explained, "The increasing pressure can manipulate your body, your anatomy and your physiology in quite profound ways, which actually make the endeavour of diving into the deep ocean uniquely difficult."

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"If you descend only 10m into the ocean, you are subjected to another additional atmosphere of pressure: that’s twice as much pressure as you’ve been used to at the surface. And for every 10m beyond you get another atmosphere of pressure," he states.

"Not only does it compress you and shrink the air-containing spaces in your body, but also it alters your physiology, alters the way the gases act within your bloodstream and how they act on everything, including your nervous system," he added.

Fong says, that when free-diving took off, physiologists were "pretty convinced that people couldn’t go beyond about 30 or 40 metres." However, "free divers decided to do it anyway – and they swam well past those theoretical limits."