Hello,
Around my area, it’s well known that if you are wearing duck waders, you never get into a boat and go out deeper than your height. It’s because if you fall out of the boat, essentially the waders fill up with water and will sink you and you have no chance to remove them.
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I guess I’m confused on how this is possible since waders are open at the top. I don’t understand how they could ‘get heavier’ I guess. I understand why like, water balloons sink in a tub of water. That’s because of the resistance from the surrounding latex essentially making the water inside the balloon more dense than the surrounding water. I guess i just have a hard time understanding with an open top.
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It would be like a plastic grocery bag in the water, wouldn’t it? Sure, it would be harder to move and you would have more drag, but my understanding is you sink like a cinder block.
In: Physics
Fill your sink with water. Now get a cup, right side up, and push the cup down into the water (but not so much that the cup is submerged). You should feel resistance because the empty cup is buoyant. In fact, if you let the cup go, it should pop up out of the water. This is because you essentially have to “push” water out of the way to make the cup go down into it, and since the amount of water you are pushing away weighs more than the cup + air, you feel a force pushing the cup out.
Now push the cup all the way down until it is submerged and fills with water. No more resistance. The cup + water is likely to be denser than water and now less buoyant. (depending on the shape, size, and material). Even if it is buoyant, it is much less so than it was. If you let the cup go now, it’ll sink and not pop back up. Lifting it up is now a chore since you are now lifting up all the water that is inside of it as well.
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