When exhaling underwater, why do multiple bubbles come out and not a big one?
In: Physics
When the air that you breathe out starts to form a bubble, the pressure of the surrounding water is immediately trying to crush that bubble. It is ultimately unable to reduce the size of the displaced air to zero, which means that the bubble remains a bubble, with its size determined by the surface tension of water and the prevailing pressure conditions. The deeper you are, the more pressure, which overcomes the surface tension of the water to a higher degree and creates a smaller bubble. When people are SCUBA diving at deeper depths, hundreds of tiny bubbles are breathed out instead of one or two or three bigger bubbles.
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