TIL: You Can Smell Through Your Skin | Today I Learned

your nose isn’t the only thing that can
smell things you can smell through your
skin and that was a big surprise on one
of our expeditions I dive into a lot of
these underwater caves that we call blue
holes and maybe at about 30 feet you hit
like these wild looking colors that’s
actually the pigments in the cells of
individual bacteria and you start
smelling something
well you’re smelling hydrogen sulfide
gas and it’s that same rotten egg smell
that you get out of sulfur springs that
in high concentrations is extremely
toxic
you have a regulator in your mouth
you’re wearing a mass so it’s not coming
in your nose you’re not breathing it in
yet you’re smelling hydrogen sulfide and
it’s actually going through the pores in
your skin do you end up spending enough
time in it you stop smelling it it
actually dead ends the olfactory nerves
and that’s cyan we use to ourselves that
we’ve been in it too long get through it
or come up these animals live in our
buildings they get on our roofs they
even go into the sewer system get away
from traffic and people and can move for
considerable distances using those
tunnels