If its basically a straight shot from your outer ear to the ear drum, how does water get ‘stuck’ in your ear after swimming?
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Not hard to explain at all. Put a straw into a glass of water and put a finger to close one end. As you pull the straw out of the water, you’ll see the water inside the straw is not coming out. Two reasons:
1. Once water reaches the ear drum, it can’t come out easily because there’s no air coming from behind (thru the ear drum). This is vacuum suction.
2. Water has surface tension. That’s why water forms droplets and not falling flat on a table for example. Together with point #1, it gets stuck to the wall of the ear, creating perfect vacuum suction.
You can put in a few drops more and once you hear whooshing sound, just immediately flip your ear down. Adding more drops will pull water surface tension away from ear wall toward the new drops, so it leaves an air gap to allow air to get behind the ear.
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