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Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part IV

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Captain_Swoop said:
At the depth of the wreck they would have been dead.
You can't breathe atmospheric air at that depth, the oxygen would be toxic and the nitrogen level would induce 'narcosis'.
Optimum gas mix for 80 meters is a '15/65' hypoxic mix (15% oxygen – 65% helium – 20% nitrogen).

This is a gas mix which containing insufficient oxygen to reliably maintain consciousness at normal sea level atmospheric pressure.
If you are on surface supply the gas mixture can be changed gradually as you descend or ascend. If you are on tanks then you have to switch to different tanks as you descend and again as you ascend.

For a 15 minute dive at 80 meters decompression stop time will total 35 minutes.

To dive between 70 and 80 meters in the UK or it's waters you need to hold a BSAC Advanced Mixed Gas Diver ticket or equivalent from PADI, SAA or SSI
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Are you sure about that, as this web site reckons you can live up to 80 hours in an airpocket.

TL;DR: depends on the size (and a bunch of other factors) but about 80 hours.

In an air pocket, the first problem is carbon dioxide build-up. Every time you exhale within the bubble, you release toxic carbon dioxide into a closed space. When carbon dioxide levels reach 50,000 parts per million, you’ll begin to feel sort of drunk. “At 70,000 parts per million, you lose consciousness pretty rapidly,” Eric Hexdall, a nurse and clinical director of diving medicine at the Duke University, told National Geographic. Hexdall calculated that, in an air pocket the size of a U-Haul moving van, it would take about 79 hours before you lost consciousness.
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This relates to an accident on the Yangtze River involving 400 passengers. Two survivors were found in an air pocket.

Rescue workers are scouring the Yangtze River for survivors from the Eastern Star cruise ship, which capsized on Monday night with roughly 400 people on board. Although only 14 survivors have been found, China remains hopeful that underwater air pockets within the ship may be keeping some passengers alive. In fact, at least two survivors have already been rescued from air pockets.

The Chinese diver behind both of those rescues told CCTV: “the bottom of the ship had a layer of air cushion, which was 1.5 to 2m thick [roughly 5 to 6 feet].” But how long can you survive in an air cushion?
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Vocativ

So 48 hours after the Estonia accident, why not take up an offer of help with specialised equipment?
 
Vixen said:
Are you sure about that, as this web site reckons you can live up to 80 hours in an airpocket.



This relates to an accident on the Yangtze River involving 400 passengers. Two survivors were found in an air pocket.

Vocativ

So 48 hours after the Estonia accident, why not take up an offer of help with specialised equipment?
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Yes I am absolutely certain. How is an 'air pocket' on the Yangtze river the same as being 80 meters down on the sea bed?

At 80 meters breathing atmospheric air at 135 psi will kill you. This is not up for negotiation. It is a fact.
 
Vixen said:
From between 64m - 80m to be exact.

Obviously a person would not live long but then they wouldn't die immediately, either.

No harm trying.
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They will be dead unless they are in a sealed pressure vessel like a submarine that remains at surface pressure.
 
Vixen said:
The specialist Russians offered.
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We previously discussed at length this purported offer. Refer to that discussion.

This guy here, survived at the bottom of the ocean for three days.

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What makes you think his circumstances were anything like what would have prevailed in a similar attempt on MS Estonia? At what depth, for example? I know. Do you? I know the difference it makes. Do you?

Note all the other divers risking their lives to save this man. Does that constitute "No harm trying" in your book?
 
Vixen said:
From between 64m - 80m to be exact.

Obviously a person would not live long but then they wouldn't die immediately, either.

No harm trying.
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50 metres (160 ft) is the maximum depth at which breathing atmospheric air is safe. Any greater depth will expose the diver to an unacceptable risk of oxygen toxicity.

They will be dead unless they are in a sealed pressure vessel like a submarine that remains at surface pressure.
Air in a 'bubble' will be compressed to a tiny volume, breathing gas consumption is proportional to ambient pressure, so for example at 80 metres (260 ft), where the pressure is 8 bar, a diver breathes 8 times as much as on the surface.
 
Vixen said:
The specialist Russians offered.

This guy here, survived at the bottom of the ocean for three days.

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That was at 30 meters, that is a recreational depth for divers, you can breath atmospheric air a that depth.

It is nothing like the depth of the Estonia.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
The irony, it burns!

Your self aggrandising arrogance in these threads is matched only by your utter incompetence in every single technical element of the discussion. You are the single most pure example of Dunning-Kruger I've ever seen.

You are accusing Jay of strutting like a peacock simply for recounting his credentials and explaining why they are relevant and give his word more weight, and yet you deliberately misrepresent yourself, and have done so repeatedly in these threads, as a scientist who took "5 years of physics" as if this was a grand accomplishment.

I find it most amusing that if the story of your physics education is indeed true, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, you've got more physics education than me but clearly know less. Looks like your education was a waste.
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As I already said, for anyone over the age of 18, what you did in school is totally irrelevant to the person you are today.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
50 metres (160 ft) is the maximum depth at which breathing atmospheric air is safe. Any greater depth will expose the diver to an unacceptable risk of oxygen toxicity.

They will be dead unless they are in a sealed pressure vessel like a submarine that remains at surface pressure.
Air in a 'bubble' will be compressed to a tiny volume, breathing gas consumption is proportional to ambient pressure, so for example at 80 metres (260 ft), where the pressure is 8 bar, a diver breathes 8 times as much as on the surface.
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But how quickly? If the highest part of the ship is on a slope at 64m deep and its Draught 5.60 m (18 ft 4 in), then it is feasible that someone in Deck 1, 4 or 5 could be in the safer zone of 50m to 58m.
 
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Vixen said:
But how quickly? If the highest part of the ship is on a slope at 64m deep and its Draught 5.60 m (18 ft 4 in), then it is feasible that someone in Deck 1, 4 or 5 could be in the safer zone of 50m to 58m.
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No. How is it 'safer'?
 
Vixen said:
As I already said, for anyone over the age of 18, what you did in school is totally irrelevant to the person you are today.
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Then why do you keep telling us what you did in school? How your 2nd grade teacher said you were the brightest student ever?
 
Vixen said:
EXACTLY.
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Then stop acting indignant when others give your purported training in physics the weight you now agree is proper. Your education and/or experience in physics or any other field is relevant to your argument only insofar as you make them. And when you do make them part of your argument, not only does it become fair game to question them, but often it's the only available rebuttal. Your arguments often consist simply of you stating as fact some proposition outside the normal ken, for which you provide no other authority, evidence, or support. When we note that you have no training or experience in these specialized fields, and that others do and dispute your statement, this is not a personal attack no matter how personally attacked you may feel. Neither this forum nor the world at large is obliged to celebrate incompetence just because its practitioners consider it well intended.

Some of your arguments directly invoke expertise, such as when you tell us how academic engineers are supposed to carry out the work they've been asked to do and what findings they should or should not pursue. That argument has evidentiary value only when you can demonstrate that your knowledge of such things is based on something more than supposition. That's the kind of knowledge that generally only comes from long personal experience. Your uninformed, speculative, or wishful expectations are not a yardstick against which factual observations or others' behavior can be measured in a way that creates evidence of anything but your naïveté.

Some of your expertise-related arguments are comically evident as bluffs, such as when you hurl out the name of some irrelevant physical concept such as Archimedes' Law without being able to discuss in greater detail how you think it applies to the situation at hand. It's an obvious pretense to expertise you obviously don't have -- while others do -- but you seem to want others to believe that mere mention ends the argument. That may work well for the coffee klatches, where the audience legitimately doesn't know much, if any, more than you do. But you won't be able to bluff forever.

Other arguments you make are not the direct product of pretended expertise, but would certainly benefit from an ability on your part to vet them before making them. Most recently, a knowledge of diving, physiology, and the physics of deep water would have permitted you to reject claims of diving to free survivors trapped in the wreck of MS Estonia. More ardent conspiracy theorists count on your inability or unwillingness to know for yourself whether their claims hold water, and therefore on your subsequent willingness to consider yourself smarter for believing their nonsense.

This last point bears on something you said recently. You claimed your interest in the MS Estonia accident belied your propensity to want to get to the bottom of things. But earlier you claimed you ruled nothing out (except, as your critics noted, the official narrative). These are incompatible goals. If you want to get to the bottom of what happened to MS Estonia, you had better starting ruling things out and leaving them ruled out. And if you lack the wherewithal to do that yourself, you had better make start listening to those who have it. Otherwise you're just going to continue to wallow in conspiracy-fueled furor revisiting, in unacknowledged ignorance, the same talking points over and over again until others write you off as ineducable.

I'm sure you've realized that no one believes your claim that you are only reporting current events, with no stake in any particular outcome. You don't seem very interested in why they disbelieve you. It's because they are competent to measure your arguments and actions against what they would do if their own goal was to draw a conclusion on the basis of the evidence. I can't speak for everyone else, of course, but my measurement comes up with the proposition that you are more interested in getting people to believe how smart, incisive, and critical you are than in understanding what happened to the ship and its poor occupants. And I'm afraid to say this is just ordinary conspiracy-theorist behavior.

Through many years of debates such as this, I've found that most conspiracy theorists don't want to get to the bottom of whatever particular matter they're theorizing about. If they were able to prove their claims to everyone else's satisfaction, those claims would then just become the new conventional narrative and the conspiracy theorists would have little more to talk about. Instead they want there to be endless controversy, so that they can continue to believe they are relevant by questioning the conventional narrative -- the narrative only those ignorant sheeple believe. And they pride themselves on being among the few to have the "knowledge" required to challenge the status quo. This is why debates with conspiracy theorists often bog down in inconsequential details like whether emergency buoys worked properly. Every minute inconsistency or irregular can be spun to support some portion of a nefarious narrative, and the conspiracy theorists believe themselves so much the cleverer for having "figured it out." Conspiracy theories are more about creating a world in which the theorist is the hero.

You're well within your rights not to believe a single thing I've said. I expect you'll either ignore this post, or brush it off with one of your signature single-sentence dismissals. But what you can't do is keep doing what you're doing and expect people to believe what you claim about what you're trying to do. It's painfully obvious that you consider any suggestion that you aren't a competent authority on whatever you're pontificating about from day to day to be a personal attack. It's okay not to be a physicist. It's okay not to be a scientist. It's okay not to be a foreign-policy expert, or a seasoned sailor. But when your arguments require others to accept that you have knowledge you can't demonstrate you have, they're going to net you exactly the kinds of responses you have been getting -- properly so.
 
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