eli5: Why is it harder to pull things out of a pool than open air?

Question

Someone reminded me of that wife’s tale where it takes a crane to remove a mattress from a pool and that itself reminds me of how sometimes removing certain floaties from the pool could be needlessly hard at times while super easy other times. Why does this happen?

In: 0

Answer 1

think of the mattress as a gigantic bucket, which weighs nothing in the water, but once it hits the surface weights a tonne. hence the videos of cranes flipping over when attempting to extract cars from the water.