The ocean can be unforgiving. But earth's real life aquaman, William Trubridge is pushing the limits of the human body.

In less than 72 hours after setting a new world record with the deepest free dive in human history, Trubridge defied the ocean again.

Plunging 124 meters deep, holding his breath for four minutes and 34 seconds, Trubridge set his 17th world record in an unplanned dive, May 3, National Post reports.

On April 30, the New Zealander dove 122 meters at this year's Vertical Blue competition in the Bahamas, breaking his own record of 121 meters set in April 2011.

In an interview, he recalls that the dive was "pretty difficult."

"I had a beautiful descent, everything went well with the descent," the 35-year-old said in a video posted to the Vertical Blue website.

However, he recalls the return was terrible. "At that point I was completely out of the headspace that I need to be in for a deep dive," he explained.

Freediving is an extreme sport that involves people diving without any breathing apparatus. In Free Immersion, the category in the competition which Trubridge joined, there is a rope that can be used by the divers to guide their paths down and up. However, there are no fins nor weights.

To put the difficulty and length of his dive in perspective, Stuff.co said, "Trubridge plunged straight down more than the height of Wellington's tallest building, the 116m Majestic Centre, before rising back to the surface."

Trubridge is the only human diver to ever make it more than 91 meters under water as the human body normally cannot withstand the pressure changes.

 Emedicine health enumerates three kinds of injuries from pressure changes when diving:

  • Barotrauma - This can occur as the pressure increases as you go down the water. By 30 feet, your lungs will shrink as the volume of air in your body decreases.
  • Decompression sickness - As explained by the website, nitrogen gas goes into the body as divers descend. "if a diver rises to the surface (decompresses) at the right rate, the nitrogen can slowly and safely leave the body through the lungs. But if a diver rises too quickly, the nitrogen forms bubbles in the body. This can cause tissue and nerve damage. In extreme cases, it can cause paralysis or death if the bubbles are in the brain."
  • Nitrogen narcosis: This simply means getting literally drunk because of the nitrogen gas in the ocean. This usually happens only dives of more than 100 feet.

Last August, Russian diver Natalia Molchanova, one of the world's greatest divers, disappeared during a recreational dive in Spain.