How exactly does underwater pressure work?

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It doesn’t actually cause humans to get crushed “like empty cans of of soda” right?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It absolutely can.

As you descend into water the water above you still has weight. The further down you go the more weight the water has the more pressure pushing on you. You would have to descend at a really high speed to crush like a can but if you are in a depressurized water craft and hop out of it at the bottom of an ocean, you have a high chance of death to water pressure.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes. Quite literally, and for the same reason. Deep underwater, the pressure of the water is way higher than the pressure of the fluids inside our bodies. Therefore, we will be compressed until those forces equalize, exactly like an empty tin can would.

I would not recommend looking up pictures of delta-p injuries.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes, yes it can cause pressure damage like empty soda cans.

So air is less dense that water and in order to function, you as a person have air in your lungs and oxygen dissolved in your blood stream. So you are less dense than water which is why you can float on water.

If you descend too deep or too fast the pressure can make your lungs cave in or the dissolved oxygen in your blood could form bubbles which can kill you.
It’s why divers have to descend and ascend slowly so their bodies can acclimatise slowly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you somehow teleported directly there from the surface you would die… fast. The air in your lungs would be crushed to about 1,000th of its volume and water will immediately enter your lungs… your digestive system as well. Even your bones would be crushed. But all this would likely be so violent I wouldn’t care to think of the exact impact on the body. Suffice to say I would expect explosive responses.

If you had some special oxygenated fluid in your lungs and digestive system and travelled down there at a very gradual rate, you’d likely survive the pressures alone.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Usually, no, you don’t get crushed. Think of water pressure as like air pressure. There’s a tremendous amount of air pressure surrounding us at any given time. But we are not crushed by the weight of the atmosphere because the atmosphere supports itself–the weight of the gases above us are supported by the gases around us. The same is true in the water. It’s not going to have any appreciable crushing effect until you’re *extremely* deep.

The main consideration is that gases compress under pressure, unlike liquids and solids. And we have lots of gases in our body–not just in our lungs, but also throughout all of our tissues and blood. So you need to keep your volume of gases at about the same regardless of pressure, or you’ll have problems. When you dive down, all of the gases in your body are compressed by the pressure and get smaller. This causes no problems in your blood, but it does cause problems in your lungs because your lungs need a minimum volume to keep from collapsing, and diving will quickly compress your lung air to be too small of a volume. Likewise you’ve probably noticed ear pain when diving because the gas in your ears compresses, creating a relative vacuum in your ear, which is painful. So that’s why you need to equalize ear pressure (add gas) and you need to use SCUBA, which feeds you gases that are pressurized to whatever your depth is, keeping your lungs inflated. You have the opposite problem on ascent–the air in your lungs and ears and blood expands. It will rip a hole in your lungs and kill you unless you are careful to exhale as you ascend. Ears are usually fine because the ear drums will usually open naturally to let the excess pressure out. But the blood gases are a real problem–the decrease in pressure causes the gases dissolved microscopically in your blood to expand and cause bubbles to form in your blood and tissues, which causes damage and death unless you decompress by slowly ascending to allow time for the excess gases to be removed from your body via traveling through your blood stream and being exhaled through the lungs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I have a question.

If i take a gulp of air at the surface and start to descend, my lungs start to shrink as the pressure compresses them,

so in theory, if I took a full breath at the surface, went down X distance, i could breath in from a resperator without exhaling, and go down X distance and breath in again without exhaling, and so on.

Right, so now I’m way down below. If I exhaled all that I had into a balloon and rose to the top, I my balloon would get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Similarly, if I used my resperater under the pressurized depths to blow up another balloon of the exact same size, that is 1 full breath of air, right? it is.

So as I rise tot he surface, that balloon gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Now i’m at the surface with a gigantic balloon. It’s tripled in size!

I try to inhale the air directly from my resperator from the balloon. I can’t do it! It’s 3 times my lung capacity!

Does it still only contain 1 normal breath’s worth of air? Like, i’d have to take all 3 breaths from the balloon to equal 1 breath of normal atmospheric air???

Anonymous 0 Comments

when you go deeper you feel the weight of the water around you. When you go scuba diving the deeper you go the more pressure is pushing in on you, but you breathe high pressure air which counteracts it.