How quickly does it happen? What kind of noise or other vibrations occur? Would occupants know as it was happening? What would be left? And all the other questions….
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When I was working offshore we had a pipe go once. It was about 2000 feet down and it was a 24 inch diameter 30 ft long pipe. I was watching it on my subs camera when it went. The shock wave was enough that I felt it in the 3rd deck of the boat through my chair.
Also, the human body cannot withstand anything above more than around 2.5 atmosphere. Just think about how rapidly conditions would change in the vessel if there were a breach at 375 atmospheres on the inner pressure vessel…
This is honestly probably what happened to these folks. Good news is, they didn’t suffer and don’t even know it happened.
Does anyone know if there will be proof if this happened? Will they likely find a smashed piece of flat metal in the following days or would it just be something we assumed happened forever?
What about the tail portion – it doesn’t seem to be as thick as the hull…where the motor, cables and oxygen is stored…it doesn’t seem to be in the pressurized tube part. Does that matter?
I wonder if it was possible for the crew to depressurize the sub themselves. If you had to choose between watching each other suffocate or die near instantaneously…
I wonder, if it imploded, are the bodies crushed between the flattened vessel or did they get pushed put of the vessel. If they found the vessel and were able to raise it, would the bodies be recovered with it for burial?
News outlets were asking about recovering human remains. Not to sound morbid, but would remains even exist? Or would they be vaporized essentially?
If you took the imploding sub out of the equation and instantaneously exerted that much pressure on a human body, what would happen? We’re mostly solid/liquid beings, and liquid doesn’t much like being compressed. Is it possible for the body to stay intact?
I’m no physicist, but in the event of a submersible imploding from the pressure of the water, the makeup of the human body inside of it has to come into account. The weight of the water on the vessel can cause an implosion because unlike air, water cannot be compressed. (We cannot base the outcome of an underwater implosion on videos of implosion caused by air pressure)
So the vessel itself would certainly crumple immediately when the AIR within it is compressed, but in theory this implosion would stop once the pressure is equalized. Considering that the human body is primarily comprised of water and those inside are already acclimated to a higher pressure inside the vessel, the hull itself wouldn’t necessarily kill the people inside by crushing them.
Their lungs would implode, along with any pockets of air within their intestines, filling immediately with any surrouding liquid within the torso. This violent osmosis would destroy any tissue surrounding any air or other gasses within the torso, but the rest can’t and won’t take much damage at all. So I disagree with the statements going around that their death would be instant… oh no. The hull would shrink around them like it was vacuum sealed and their water-based bodies would equalize the pressure inside the shrunken metal. They’d likely feel everything that happened and be aware of the metal wrapped tightly around their compressed bodies, but they’d have a few seconds of consciousness to understand it, certainly. Even if the heart stops, the brain will still have enough non-compressable oxygen within it to operate for up to 10 seconds. Depending on what gasses were added to account for the pressure, they may have been conscious for longer.
A former submarine expert explained what this might be like. Dave Corley, a retired Navy Captain, said: “When a submarine hull collapses, it moves inward at about 1,500 miles per hour – that’s 2,200 feet per second.
“A modern nuclear submarine’s hull radius is about 20 feet. So the time required for complete collapse is 20 / 2,200 seconds = about 1 millisecond. A human brain responds instinctually to the stimulus at about 25 milliseconds. Human rational response is at best 150 milliseconds.
“The air inside a sub has a fairly high concentration of hydrocarbon vapors. When the hull collapses it behaves like a very large piston on a very large Diesel engine. The air auto-ignites and an explosion follows the initial rapid implosion Sounds gruesome but as a submariner I always wished for a quick hull-collapse death over a lengthy one like some of the crew on Kursk endured.”
John Jones, a former member of the US Navy Submarine Force, added: “Implosion events occur within milliseconds, far too quickly for the human brain to comprehend.”
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