Underwater, there are insane implosions at 25K feet below sea level. At that same depth on land, we have caves.
Why doesn’t the earth compress things like water does? Does gravity do different things to different materials?
In: Planetary Science
>Underwater, there are insane implosions at 25K feet below sea level. At that same depth on land, we have caves.
No we don’t. I think you’re not understanding how deep that is. The deepest cave is only about 7,500 ft deep, so a third as deep. (Also, that cave actually begins at about 7,500 ft elevation and the bottom is at approximately sea level.)
>Why doesn’t the earth compress things like water does? Does gravity do different things to different materials?
The answer to the question you’re really asking is that rocks actually have shear strength and you can tunnel through them without having them collapse, depending on exactly what you’re tunneling through and how you build the tunnel. Water doesn’t have shear strength. It just flows everywhere it can. So the reason you can have a 7,000 ft deep cave with a void that people can go into and survive, but 7,000 ft underwater would crush you to death, is that in the cave, the rock around you is supporting all of the weight of the rock above it, and the only pressure increase you have to worry about is air. Air has very low density, so you don’t have to worry too much about the increased air pressure.
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