Obviously if we put live electricity in the sea, the whole ocean wouldn’t then become dangerous with it. At what point does the electricity stop? What stops it?
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Nothing stops it. Electricity wants to go back to its source. If you put a live wire in the water the electricity will flow back through the water and then the ground to the neutral point of the transformer providing the power. It won’t just go out looking to electrocute people. You’re only in danger if you’re in the way.
Depends on how you “put electricity” in.
When lightning hits the ocean, it can more or less flow in any direction through the water, and the power dissipates accordingly.
Just think of it expanding (hemi)spherically from the point it hits: the further it gets, the larger the area it covers becomes. The larger the area gets, the smaller the current per area becomes, until it is not noticeable any more.
Electricity is the flow of electrons. Electrons want to be in balance with protons. Electricity flows because the electrons are trying to get in balance and it stops once they are. Lightning occurs because a cloud accumulates too many electrons. Air is mostly empty space. Water and earth are dense and contain many protons (and electrons). After the lightning (electrons) jumps to the ground, they spread out among all those protons.
I’m not sure if this relates to OP’s question but people have been electrocuted in ponds due to faulty pond pumps. And electric barriers are used to keep invasive fish species out of certain waterways.
Electricity is the overall flow of little things called electrons. Imagine them as little billiard balls that can flow through things quite well because they are really tiny. An important property of these balls however, is something called an electric charge. An electron has a negative one and a proton has a positive one. Depending on the specific case, there can be many grouped charges, like when electrons build up in lightning, or dispersed throughout like in everyday materials. It can also flow through things quite well, depending on the environment and how well they’re held in place “normally”.
In the case of water, let’s say it’s coming from a cloud in the sky as in lightning. You can picture it as the cloud holding a bucket of electrons and suddenly pouring out once it reaches its maximum limit. These balls coming crashing down at a high speed and strike the water. At that instant, the balls crash down and possibly causing the water to evaporate, dissociate, and ionize. You can picture this as billiard balls violently crashing down into a ball pit. They will crash into things, causing all sorts of mess.
After the initial strike, the balls tend to flow away from one another because like-charges repel via the “Coloumb force”. This really just means that they don’t like to be together unless there are conditions that favour it, like the ones that occur when building up in the clouds. Once they are in a relatively “free” environment in water, they will disperse around that area, preferring to go in directions where there are less electrons around. If the water is really shallow, this is probably just going to be the ground. If it’s deeper, like the ocean, it will probably take a longer while before it reaches “ground”, or any kind of electrical sink, which acts to “take in” all of the extra charge.
The electrons eventually “stop” or at least, in a manner that we count as electricity, when they crash into something, react with something, or get absorbed into something. The electricity requires something to interact with it in order to “stop” or disperse effectively. It will stop acting as the “electricity” that we consider as a consistent current (the stream of balls falling) soon after the strike, since the balls will find themselves running away from each other very quickly, crashing into things as they go.
Since I finally got an excuse to ask: I saw a movie once, in which the hero killed a bad guy, by showing a taser into a guys mouth, while they both were in a lake, and they were locked in battle.
Whether it was an actual tazer, or some other kinda electrical thingamajig, I could not say for certain, but it worked a treat in the movie. Presumably the effect was improved by the bad guy being in the water.
However, assuming the device would be lethal while shoved down the bad guys throat, wouldn’t it also at least backfire a little on the hero? They’re touching each other, and both are properly dunked. Although, in an entire lake.
The movie, which might be slightly spoiled if you know the title, is >!Striking distance, with Bruce Willis!<
Depends on how pure of water it is. Completely distilled water with zero minerals dissolved in it won’t conduct much electricity at all
Fun fact. pure water doesn’t conduct electricity, granted you’ll never find it in nature, it’s the devolved substances in the water that conduct the electricity.
You’re kind of coming from the wrong angle. You’re implying that when we put “electricity” into the water, it already goes somewhere, and that there is a point at which it “stops” going somewhere. This is kind of true, but not in the way you think. Everyone else has explained why it’s not true, so I’ll explain why it is true.
For those who understand electric current, ignore all sign convention because it’s confusing and unnecessary for the basics.
To “electrify” a body of water, you have to either put electrons in or take electrons out on a large scale (since that’s basically what electric current *is*, the movement of electrons) which will then spread out and push each other (and other electrons in the water) away from each other. With the extra “oomph” from the current injection (the voltage) there will be a new steady state: either the electrons will find a new place to go (for example the earth or the other terminal of the battery) or, if there is not a place for these electrons to go, then eventually they will bunch up and push back against the source of electrons that’s trying to push them into the water (and a higher voltage source can push more electrons in. This is essentially a capacitor, and the key difference between a capacitor and a battery; a capacitor stores electrical energy and a battery stores chemical energy that it converts to electrical energy.)
The electricity “stops” when the electron injection gets so far away from you that it can’t have a major impact (like sunlight getting dimmer and dimmer the farther away you get in space.)
Things get pretty confusing because we usually say electricity “has” to go back to where it came from to “complete the circuit,” but this isn’t strictly true, and we take advantage of this all the time (it’s called a “floating ground” or a “floating potential” if you’re curious.) The earth is so large that we can treat it as both an infinitely large sink and source for electrons for all conventional purposes, which is why we use it as a global connection for everything (“earth ground.”) However, if you don’t provide a path for the electrons to return to the source, then you aren’t replacing the electrons, and the electron source will eventully have its own force trying to pull the electrons back in, meaning it will get weaker over time as it gets harder to push the electrons out while they get pulled back in.
I don’t know the math of it, but when I was a kid we had a swimming pool. One of the lights developed a short and if you got too close you’d feel the buzzing on your skin. We used to play a game where we’d close our eyes and see who could get their face closest to it underwater. The closest any of us could get was about 6 inches, and the electricity dancing behind your eyelids looked crazy
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