Why the pressure of the water is so more in the depth of the Ocean? OR Why there is so much high pressure in the Ocean water compared to small water bodies?
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Because water is heavy, the deeper you go down, the more water that is above you pushing down. Think about it like if you were to have 5 gallons of water on top of you compared yo 500,000 gallons of water above you.
Imagine that you put a sack of flour on your head. It weighs about 5 pounds so you feel 5 pounds of pressure on your head. Now, put 100 sacks of flour on your head. You feel 500 pounds of pressure.
In the depths of the ocean there is way more water above you pushing down and creating pressure.
Pressure in water is exactly dependant on depth. Every 9.81m of water bring your 1 Bar of pressure with their weight pushing down.
Oceans are deep (citation needed).
A small extra: saltwater is a little more dense, making ocean water a bit heavier. So at the same depth the ocean has a slightly higher pressure than in fresh water.
The weight of the water above you increases the deeper you go and this increases the pressure you feel on your skin.
The same applies to air, and can be measured with air pressure meter.
Basically because there’s so much more water on top. Think which would have more pressure:
You laying down with two bricks on your chest vs you laying down with 1,000,000 bricks on top of you.
Replace the bricks with water and there you go.
The pressure when you’re under water is just the weight of all the water above you pushing down on you. It’s like being under a bunch of heavy blankets. The more that are stacked up on top of you, the more pressure they’ll push down on you.
So pressure goes up as you go deeper in water. The oceans are on average much deeper than any lake, so the pressure at the bottom of the oceans is higher.
There is one more factor that makes the pressure higher in the oceans compared to (most) lakes: salt. When salt dissolves in water its weight is added to the water without changing the volume of the water very much, so salt water is more dense than fresh water: a glass full of salty ocean water weighs more than the same glass full of fresh lake water. So there is more pressure at the same depth in salt water than in fresh water because the salt water above you at that depth weighs more than fresh water would.
Water pressure is from the water weighing down on you. the deeper you are, the more water’s above you, so it weighs more in total, so pressure increases the deeper you are. the ocean is often deeper than other bodies of water, so the higher the maximum pressure is. Salt water is also slightly heavier than fresh water, so a given depth at sea will have slightly more pressure than that depth in a river or lake.
Here’s the basic math. The weight of the entire atmosphere air above you is roughly what we call “1 Bar” of pressure.
10 feet of water is also roughly 1 Bar of pressure. So just diving down to roughly the bottom of a swimming pool is enough to double all the pressure of the entire atmosphere down on you.
Now imagine the oceans depths measured in 10 foot intervals, the are easily hundreds of those intervals down to the bottom, so hundreds of times more pressure than at sea level.
The only factor in the pressure is depth, linear depth.
if you’ve ever dived to the bottom of a swimming pool at 3m depth, you’ll feel the weight of all the water above you squeezing you. if you’re wearing a wrist watch, you can look at the band and see it go loose when you’re just 3m under water. now imagine, at 300m or 10x the depth what the pressure is. same thing would happen if you were buried by dirt or sand, but water is a bit less dense than sand of course.
Because all that water has a lot of water pressing down on it.
If you laid down right now you wouldn’t mind, right? Now you have one person lay down on top of you, it would be alright but slightly uncomfortable. Now make it two. It’s very uncomfortable. Now make it three. Keep doing that until you have a few hundred people laying down on top of you. That’s a lot of weight right?
That’s what’s happening when you go deeper and deeper in a body of water.
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