Introduction
On recreational dives, a safety stop is a non-mandatory stop done at the end of a dive to give more time to the tissues to off-gas the excess nitrogen, giving divers an extra margin of safety. Although varying between each agency and each dive center, it is usual for safety stops to take place at a depth of 5 meters for 3 minutes (a depth of 6 meters isn't uncommon either).
Although they are non-mandatory, they have been shown to decrease silent bubble occurrences (a precursor to Decompression Sickness) and increase safety for successive dives.
In this article, I will first show how a safety stop affects the nitrogen level in your body (I will use the ZH-L16C model which makes us track the nitrogen level in 16 distinct body compartments, but more on that later), then, try to hypothesize alternative safety stops, by varying the time and the depth, and attempt to find a safety stop that maximizes nitrogen off-gassing.
