[T]here is no oxygen tank at the end of the rope, and if there had been... their lungs would have exploded... and their blood would have bubbled with nitrogen before they reached the surface. ...The human body can withstand the pressures of a fast three-hundred-foot... ascent only in its natural state.
Some humans handle it better than others.
American journalist
James Nestor is a journalist who has written for Outside, , , Dwell, National Public Radio, The New York Times, , , and others.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Truebridge just dove thirty stories... all on one lungfull of air... The pressure... is more than ten times that at the surface, strong enough to crush a Coke can. At thirty feet. the lungs collapse to hald their normal size; at three hundred feet they shrink to the size of two baseballs. ...The dives don't look forced... as if they all really belong down there. As if we all do.
It's a hard thing to fathom, the concept that you, me, the birds, and the bees—all life that is and has ever been—came from a few chemical reactions on some ugly rocks a few billion years ago. Proposing such a theory... [e]ven 50 years ago... might have gotten you... ostracized by the scientific community.
That all changed in 1977 when... chartered a research vessel... to the Galápagos Trench. Corliss suspected that a... , was erupting on the deep seafloor... [A]t a depth of around 2,500 meters... ANGUS’s temperature gauge registered a... spike. After several hours, the team... developed the film. ...There was life..—crabs, mussels, lobsters, worms—all flourishing... The incredible pressure, 250 times that on the surface, kept the water from turning to steam.
[I]n many ways, rocks at the bottom of the deep sea, buried under a mile of Earth’s crust, or covered in bird crap on aren’t inanimate objects at all. They are undulating, "breathing" systems crammed with organisms so tiny and metabolizing so slowly that nobody ever noticed.
Most researchers never bothered. Seeking out extreme life requires traveling to some of Earth’s most far-flung and miserable environments. Only a handful of microbiologists and geologists have had the will, fortitude, and resources to endure weeks in the triple-digit heat within African mines, or months in the frozen expanses of Antarctica, or years sifting through the polluted oil fields of to find answers.