I failed all my science courses, I don’t understand much about science but why doesn’t the water just… move like when you jump in normally?
In: Planetary Science
To enter water, you need to push it aside. It has to go somewhere.
The one place it can’t go is straight down, because as far as your body is concerned, water is incompressible.
Or rather, let me amend the above statement: Water can be pushed down if you force the water below it to also move out of the way. And that water also has to go somewhere, so you have to move all the other water, too.
In other words, you’d need to raise the rest of the water level up. Which is possible… Mathematically. The only problem is the force required to do that by decelerating from high speed also liquifies your body first. Your body can, ahem, spread sideways far easier than the water can be moved down.
So if you hit water in a “flat” way, it basically has nowhere to go and “slaps” you back with equal force. Exactly like a solid surface.
BUT! It is far easier to push water to the side, it actually has somewhere to go, or at least you’re trying to move a massively smaller mass of it. So if you arrange yourself into a shape that does that, you can penetrate the surface. A pointy shape. That’s exactly what people are trained to do if jumping from heights.
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