gas content

Question
What is the total approximate dissolved gas content in blood and tissues in an average sized person at one atmosphere ambient (saturated and  at 30 min. at 100 feet of water.

Answer
My friend at NASA tells me that the gas content, on average, is one liter per atmosphere  at saturation, so that's four liters for saturation at 100 feet (4 ATA).  

That's based on a rule of thumb, he does not have a value for 30 minutes at 100 feet, so I have sent an e-mail to some other friends who, some years ago, did a study using radio-tagged nitrogen in a saturation diving system, perhaps they'll have an uptake curve.

From Gene Hobbs of the Rubicon Project:

The closest "measured" nitrogen volume I can think of included a 100fsw/ 25 minute dive:

Dick, AP; Vann, RD; Mebane, GY; Feezor, MD. Decompression induced nitrogen elimination. Undersea Biomed Res. 1984 Dec;11(4):369-80. RRR ID: 2981

They do a nice job describing their method as well as showing how changes in cardiac output will have an effect on inert gas uptake and elimination.

Some others that might be of interest (from our collection anyway) can be found with the keywords "nitrogen elimination". A PubMed search will also turn up a few others that are interesting reading, keywords "nitrogen elimination diving".

Check:

http://archive.rubicon-foundation.org/dspace/simple-search?query="nitrogen+elimi...

and

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=search&term=nitrogen+elim...

Rubicon Project: http://rubicon-foundation.org/