Can you breathe above the clouds

Mount Everest is the highest place on Earth. The human body can adapt to high altitude through immediate and long-term acclimatization. At high altitude there is lower air pressure compared to a lower altitude or sea-level altitude. The partial pressure gradients for gas exchange are also decreased, along with the percentage of oxygen saturation in hemoglobin.

Partial pressures. You can breath at 35, ft without a pressured suit, but go much higher and you can't. At sea level, you have mmHg of air pressure. The answer is yes, you can!

Even in freefall, falling at speeds up to mph, you can easily get plenty of oxygen to breathe. Not being able to breathe is a common misconception of skydiving. The stratosphere is not a good place to be. First, the ozone in the stratosphere, which protects us from biologically destructive solar ultraviolet light, exists at such high levels that the air itself is toxic.

Second, even this toxic air is much too thin for normal breathing. Sleep Disturbances Trouble sleeping is quite common at high altitude. The low oxygen directly affects the sleep center of the brain.

Frequent awakenings, a light sleep and less total time of sleep are the main problems, and these usually improve with acclimatization after a few nights. High-altitude locations are usually much colder than areas closer to sea level. This is due to the low air pressure. Air expands as it rises, and the fewer gas molecules—including nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide—have fewer chances to bump into each other.

Technically yes, relative to an observer on Earth, a person at higher altitudes will age faster. Less Oxygen at High Elevations Humans perform best — both physically and mentally — at sea level where the atmospheric pressure is 1 atm. India needs spiked boots to play the new Afghan Great Game: R.

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Additional info. Submit Reset. Go to 18, feet without supplemental oxygen and the saturation drops to 80 percent thanks to the partial pressure of oxygen being just 21 percent of the atmospheric pressure at any altitude. That means we're going to start getting woozy and hypoxic, and unless we've added substantial hemoglobin to our bloodstreams by living at very high altitudes, we'll eventually black out.

There is an altitude range, however, where even breathing percent oxygen with percent partial oxygen pressure from a little yellow mask in a jetliner won't provide enough life-sustaining oxygen saturation in the bloodstream.

That point is around 28, to 30, feet. Above that, there isn't enough oxygen pressure even when breathing pure oxygen to shove the O2 molecules across the membranes and into the hemoglobin. The cure is pressure breathing, which you can't do with yellow supplemental masks.

Pressure breathing oxygen masks the type you'll find in the cockpit force pure oxygen into your lungs at a higher pressure than the surrounding air and keep your blood oxygen saturation level above 87 percent.

But the techniques for pressure breathing require practice in an altitude chamber, and are so foreign to our normal methods of respiration that few passengers would be able to cope with it in an emergency even if we provided such masks in the back.

Your pilots, however, are well-trained, and have pressure-breathing oxygen masks beside them at all times. You have nine to 15 seconds to place the mask over your own face before you lost consciousness. That's why it would be so vital for you to immediately put on your own mask first. Now, in the cockpit immediately after an emergency decompression depressurization , the pilots will instantly don their pressure breathing masks and begin an emergency descent to lower altitude. Even at 40, feet, the time during which a passenger would be exposed to a cabin altitude higher than the yellow emergency masks could deal with is around 90 seconds.

In other words, you will probably black out on the way down from 40, during the emergency descent without a pressure breathing mask. But, with the yellow supplemental mask in place, you'll regain consciousness with no permanent bad effects as the aircraft descends through 28, feet.