a kitten is sitting on your chest as you lay on the couch. the kitten is suddenly replaced with andre the giant.
one of those is a lake, the other is the ocean, and the effect is the same. that gravity effect on the mass determines pressure, and you feel way more when theres way more pressing down on you.
If I have 1 m^2 of space and I put 1 N of force on it, it experiences 1 Pa of pressure.
Air pressure at sea level is about 10000 Pa (1 atm = 101325 Pa)
That same air pressure on that 1 m^2 of space means there’s 10 kN of force on it, and that is the weight of all of the air above it (all the way to space)
Water is heavier than air, infact 1 m^3 of water has a mass of 1000 kg (1 metric tonne) that’s 1 kN of weight (using g = 10 m/s^2 for simplicity)
If we take the 1 m^2 and place it a 10 m under water, that’s 10 kN of water on top of it, resulting in another 10 kPa of pressure, or another atmosphere pressing down on that 1 m^2
The deeper you go, the more pressure you get. Smaller bodies of water aren’t usually as deep as the ocean, so we get higher pressures in the ocean.
Pressure is a force applied over an area.
Weight is a force caused by the gravitational pull on an object. So pressure is just a weight divided by an area.
When you are underwater, gravity is pulling the water above you downwards. The pressure is just the weight of this column of water above you divided by the area of the column.
For example, in the USA we use pounds per square inch (psi) for our typical unit of pressure. This means if at the bottom of the ocean the pressure is 1000 psi then if you removed a square column of water with dimensions of 1 inch by 1 inch from where you are to the surface, and then weighed that water, it would weigh 1000 pounds. Ok, that isn’t quite right because you also have the atmosphere weighing down on you. We need to take a 1″x1″ column of air up to the edge of the atmosphere and weigh it. If we did, we’d find that that column of air weighed about 14.7 pounds. Therefore that water column really only weighed 1000-14.7=985.3 lbs.
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