The Deepest Free Dive Ever Done By A Human
Oh shucks! You just cannonballed into the pool and your bottoms came off! Now they've sunk to the bottom!! You have no choice. You must test your physical limits, face your fears and descend all 10 feet.
It won't be easy. You'll have to overcome the pressure — Per the National Ocean Service: "At sea level, the air that surrounds us presses down on our bodies at 14.5 pounds per square inch. You don't feel it because the fluids in your body are pushing outward with the same force."
But once you're underwater all bets are off. The pressure makes your eardrums feel like they're going to burst, due to an increase in hydrostatic pressure, or "the force per unit area exerted by liquid on an object." Every inch increases the pressure, and every 33 feet, the pressure increases by 14.5 psi.
Of course, there's also the startling lack of oxygen. Which brings us to the "YOBO" nature of freediving — You Only Breathe Once. If you don't think you can fetch your underoos from the depths of the pool, freedivers are the people to call.
Freediving: A Nitsch sport
Freediving is a competitive sport with different variations on the theme of going dangerously deep underwater without oxygen. Unsurprisingly, the one that makes the most headlines is "no limits" freediving, where you "use a weight to take you as deep as possible and then a buoyancy device to return you to the surface," according to Deeper Blue. In other words, you can go deeper, faster.
This is the discipline where the record for the deepest free dive ever done by a human was set, and boy was it deep. The record holder is Herbert Nitsch, an Austrian freediving champion and real-world Aquaman who can now honestly call himself "The Deepest Man on Earth" after diving to a depth of 830.8 feet.
It almost killed him and others have died trying lesser distances, but he's the only person to even come close to that depth. According to his website, "Herbert can hold his breath for more than 9 minutes and has set a total of 33 world records. 32 of these are across all of the 8 recognized freediving disciplines – unrivaled achievements in freediving history."
So, lock up your internet search history when Herbert's around, cause there are essentially no limits to how deep he'll dive.