Under Pressure

During my voyage the Maury surveyed over 22,100 square miles!! Occassionally we get to send testing equipment to the bottom. To have some fun, we took some steyerfoam cups and tied them to our equipment and lowered them into the water. To see how much the cup I made would shrink, I took initial mesaurements: 4.5inches tall and 3.5inches wide at the rim.

The final depth on sight measured 4,147 Meters. That’s over 2miles deep! What’s crazy is that technology has become so advanced that we can drop our equipment to the bottom and return to the surface in under 4 hours. To think where oceanography first began it’s truly come a long way. The final measurements ended up being about 2.25inches tall and 1.75inches wide at the rim. The cup shrank even more than I thought it would and it surprised me. It shrank to become a really cute shot glass! It came out almost adorable! ☺

So the numbers: a person naturally experiences 14lbs per square inch (psi) on their bodies at the ground level, or 1 atmospheric pressure (atm). However, water is much more dense. In fact, 1atm=34ft of fresh water, and 1atm=33ft of salt water. As the cups lowered they experienced increasingly more pressure thus causing the cups to shrink.

4,147m × 3.28ft/m = 13,602.16ft

13,602.16ft ÷ 33ft = 412.19atm

At 2miles below the surface the water becomes so heavy that the cup was experiencing 412 times more pressure than on the surface!!! 😱🤯 That is more than bone crushing pressure!! If you ever see videos of deep diving you will notice that people travel inside environment, and pressure controlled vehicles. Aside from needing a steady oxygen supply, the pressure makes deep diving difficult and so dangerous. I’m glad we did this cup experiment. I learned alot myself, and it’s part of our mission that I get to share with you all and take home. It was kind of fun, too. The Chief Mate even made a cup – his was funny. 😛