– If the pressure at the bottom of the ocean is so extreme, are the molecules pushed closer together? If so, why isn’t it hotter, if the molecules are bumping into each other more?

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– If the pressure at the bottom of the ocean is so extreme, are the molecules pushed closer together? If so, why isn’t it hotter, if the molecules are bumping into each other more?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The molecules are pushed closer together, but not by much. Water is essentially “incompressible.”
An easy way to visualize that idea is picturing trying to make a block of concrete smaller by pushing on it between your hands. Neither the water, nor the concrete will change by any significant amount, no matter how hard you push. So, yes, the molecules are pushed closer together, but only by a super tiny amount.

As to the temperature thing, the water isn’t hotter for a few reasons.
First, energy is only added to something in the process of being compressed. If you took a chamber full of any gas and compressed it, then it would heat up. If you then left that box/chamber in a room for a while, the temperature of the gas would slowly change to match the ambient temperature of the room. Any temperature that may have been gained by the water at the bottom of the ocean by compression has long since been dispersed across the ocean.

Second, molecules being closer together isn’t what determines temperature; molecules colliding does.
Think of a room with a crowd of people. If the people are all running around really fast and smacking into each other, that would be a very hot temperature. If the people are all standing still, then the temperature would be very cold because they aren’t colliding.
If you shrunk the size of the room, but the people are still standing very still, then the amount/rate of collisions won’t change.

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