MarkH
Contributor
I was wondering: I dive in reasonably cold water. At the start of the dive, the extremities (hands, feet, other things I won't mention) are nice and warm. I go deeper and nitrogen starts to build up. I am still warm. I decide I've been down long enough and start to acsend. Since I've been down for awhile, I'm starting to feel cold. My body shuts down the blood supply to my extremities to keep my core warm. There is still excess nitrogen in these tissues that now has no blood supply to carry it to the lungs to off-gas. As I near the surface, what happens to this nitrogen? This is a theoretical situation. I am usually warm throughout my dives, but I always hear local divers saying that their hands were cold near the end of their dive. Why don't they have the bends?