I’ve always wondered and never understood how buoyancy works, especially with huge metal ships that I think should surely sink.
In: Physics
It’s all about density. Density is mass divided by volume. Denser objects move to the bottom, less dense objects move to the top. Buoyancy takes the *entire* object; that is, the whole metal hull plus all the cargo and people and everything else, AND the hundreds of cubic meters of air inside the ship, into account.
Plus, water is actually really, really heavy. It’s about ten pounds per gallon. Air is obviously extremely light by comparison.
So, while the hull and cargo and everything else are denser than water, when you take into account the very large percentage of the volume of the ship that’s just air, overall, it’s less dense than the water, so it floats.
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