Comments by "Rob Fraser" (@krashd) on "National Geographic"
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There is 14.5lbs of pressure pressing against every inch of your body but you don't feel it because it has always been there, humans (and all sea-level dwelling creatures) have evolved to effortlessly endure this, it is the pressure from the atmosphere (air) pushing down on you and is known as "1 atmosphere" of pressure. In space 200 miles above our head there is no atmosphere, just vacuum, so no pressure aka zero atmosphere.
But although the difference between zero and 1 is 200 to 300 miles upward, the difference between 1 and 2 is just 33 feet (a tiny bit over 10 metres) downward. This is because we move from air in to water and water is so many magnitudes denser than air, it is seriously heavy. Also for every 10 metres after that pressure again increases by 1 atmosphere.
Humans can safely dive to about 60 metres, or 6 atmospheres, before the pressure becomes detrimental and exhausting to move around in. A typical submarine can safely operate around 400 metres (40 atmospheres) and even then the pressure is like having the entire weight of a car pushing on every single inch of the submarine's surface, any weak spot could cause a submarine to implode like someone standing on a balloon.
The Atlantic ocean is typically about 3 and a half kilometres deep, that's 3,500 metres, at that depth anything containing air, even a thick sold steel barrel, would be crushed like a beer can. This is why the stern of Titanic was utterly wrecked while the bow wasn't - the bow filled up with water over two hours as Titanic was slowly sinking, when the bow broke off and fell to the ocean floor it was full of water and so it wasn't crushed, but the stern which was raised up out of the water was empty of water, so when the bow snapped off and the stern started to fill with water it fell faster than it could fill up and all of the pockets of air - cabins, corridors, tanks, containers, air pockets between compartments - all crumpled and imploded sending bits of the stern flying as they burst inwards under the pressure. This is why the stern has little or no plating still on it and why it has a massive debris field around it.
I know this post is a bit more info than you asked for, but no, no one would be alive by the time the stern reached the bottom, anyone still inside it (and there were hundreds unable to get up on deck) would have died in the first minute as it plummeted beyond 300 metres, all of the spaces people were in would have smashed in on them killing them instantly. As scary as it would have been it still would have been a much faster death than the hundreds who spent 5 to 15 minutes freezing to death up on the surface.
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MaiCohWolf, it's basic displacement, it's also why people tell you to get as far away as you can from a ship that is moments away from sinking. There is a suction effect when something drops below the surface of a fluid, the surrounding water (and any lifeboats or people) in it will be dragged in to fill the gap that is left behind and everything will get dragged under. This force actually keeps going straight to the bottom, as a 100,000 tonne ship falls through the water it will drag anything nearby in to the void behind it and when that ship finally comes to a halt on the ocean floor the enormous pressure of the water following it will hit like an enormous sledgehammer. That is known as downblast.
Anything moving through a fluid, be it a ship through water or a hand through air, will drag that fluid with it to fill the gap left behind. The best way to observe this force is with a fluid that is very viscous like syrup or honey, if you push a spoon in to something like syrup you will see the syrup try to fill the hole left by the spoon, now in water the force is much faster, and with something the size of a passenger liner the force is a trillion times stronger.
This is why the lifeboats were ordered to withdraw and then come back later, to avoid being pulled under with the ship, they waited to long however before returning and everyone froze.
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