Speaker 1: My welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. Robert. There's a kind of mistake we
Speaker 1: all make in our modern electrified homes, and this is
Speaker 1: microwave mistakes. What's the worst microwave mistake you've ever made? Oh? Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know about the worst. I mean, generally it
Speaker 1: just involves megan a mass like splat splattering something, not
Speaker 1: covering something appropriately, so you have to not only remove
Speaker 1: your food from the microwave, but then scrub it out.
Speaker 1: I remember there was one day not too long ago.
Speaker 1: I think it might have been like on New Year's
Speaker 1: this year or something that within the same day, I
Speaker 1: think I tried to microwave butter to melt it and
Speaker 1: it exploded in the microwave. But then I also tried
Speaker 1: to microwave a soft boiled egg to heat it up
Speaker 1: and it exploded. Uh so, I don't know. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of exploding the microwave. But there's another kind of
Speaker 1: microwave mistake where we use this radio range of ultramodern
Speaker 1: convenience uh to to maybe maybe do a little less
Speaker 1: troublesome damage than than blowing up an egg, but at
Speaker 1: least causing frustration. When you warp lids of containers in
Speaker 1: the microwave. You've ever done this? Uh? So you know
Speaker 1: you want to heat up some food, maybe you just
Speaker 1: want to sterilize a bowl full of mud or something,
Speaker 1: So you put it in a glass bowl with a
Speaker 1: tight fitting lid or you know, tight fitting plastic, tight
Speaker 1: fitting rubber lid. Uh. You know you maybe shouldn't do this,
Speaker 1: but you forget, but you cover it up with something
Speaker 1: that fits tight, and you microwave it and it gets
Speaker 1: piping hot, and you leave it standing in the microwave
Speaker 1: for a minute, and then when you check it, the
Speaker 1: lid or the plastic wrap or whatever you've used to
Speaker 1: cover it has been sucked down into a concave depression
Speaker 1: over the food. It has turned your you know, if
Speaker 1: it's a permanent lid, it has warped it maybe or
Speaker 1: you've caused trouble. And the way we normally think about
Speaker 1: these kind of things is that when something like this happens,
Speaker 1: the lid or the plow stick was sucked down. But
Speaker 1: think about why is that happening. What's actually happening there?
Speaker 1: What's the attractive force pulling the lid of the container
Speaker 1: down into the food? Obviously it's not gravity, right, The
Speaker 1: food isn't like a star pulling things into its orbit.
Speaker 1: And it's not electromagnetism. The food isn't a magnet attracting
Speaker 1: an opposite charge. It's not like the strong force that
Speaker 1: holds atomic nuclei together. So what's the attraction there? So
Speaker 1: superdnse potatoes are out of the question. No, though those
Speaker 1: can be a big problem. That's why when you make
Speaker 1: a big potato, fun fact, you should cut it open
Speaker 1: right after you pull it out of the oven. Don't
Speaker 1: leave it to sit there forever it turns into a rock. No. Counterintuitively, strangely,
Speaker 1: what's happening when that lid gets pushed down is the
Speaker 1: atmosphere pressing on it. When the lid bends, what you're
Speaker 1: witnessing is the weight of the air we breathe. And
Speaker 1: it's a powerful Wait, it really is, but we don't
Speaker 1: norm normally notice it. Like, how come the atmosphere only
Speaker 1: pushes a depression into the lid after it's been microwave?
Speaker 1: Why doesn't the atmosphere, bend the lid when it's just
Speaker 1: sitting on the counter at room temperature. One thing you
Speaker 1: might be thinking is, okay, maybe it heats the lid
Speaker 1: up and this like sort of melts it or something
Speaker 1: and makes it more appliable. But no, that that's not
Speaker 1: necessarily the case. It's because of the power of condensation.
Speaker 1: After you microwave a bowl of food containing water, a
Speaker 1: lot of the water in that food is turned into
Speaker 1: steam or water vapor. And of course when liquid is
Speaker 1: turned into a gas, it not only becomes hot, but
Speaker 1: it expands. It takes up more space, and it expands
Speaker 1: to fill evenly all the space it can. So the
Speaker 1: spots inside the sealed bowl are not occupied that are
Speaker 1: not occupied by food, they get filled with hot, high
Speaker 1: pressure steam. And of course we know one thing that
Speaker 1: can happen here as as water turns to steam inside
Speaker 1: a sealed container is it can make the container explode.
Speaker 1: In some cases, that's what happened I think with my egg,
Speaker 1: Like the yolk is turning to steam and it had
Speaker 1: to expand, and so the egg blew up. But if
Speaker 1: your container doesn't expand, it just fills with high pressure steam.
Speaker 1: And then when the microwaving stops, the contents of the
Speaker 1: bowl cool down again. And what happens, well, the steam
Speaker 1: that had filled all these voids in the bowl starts
Speaker 1: to lose energy, it cools down, it gradually converts back
Speaker 1: into liquid water. And this process, of course, is known
Speaker 1: as condensation. It's the same reason that dew forms on
Speaker 1: the outside of your cold soda can on a warm day.
Speaker 1: The cold can is converting water vapor in the air
Speaker 1: into liquid by cooling it. But if the bowl in
Speaker 1: the microwave has a tight fitting lid, or it's wrapped
Speaker 1: tightly in plastic, what happens when the water converts from
Speaker 1: a gas back into a liquid while it takes up
Speaker 1: less space and it exerts less pressure on the inside
Speaker 1: of the bowl. Thus, a covered bowl becomes a low
Speaker 1: pressure environment or a partial vacuum. Without air pushing back
Speaker 1: at the same pressure on the lid from below. The
Speaker 1: atmosphere leans hard on the it and it presses it
Speaker 1: down into the evacuated space, the vacuum, punching it into
Speaker 1: that bowl shape. So what you're seeing when the when
Speaker 1: the lid bends down is the footprint of the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: and of course The reason the lid doesn't normally warp
Speaker 1: informa bowl when it's sitting on the counter or whatever
Speaker 1: is that the pressure is equalized on both sides. There's
Speaker 1: atmosphere below it as well. The partial vacuum created by
Speaker 1: the condensation of steam changes. That evacuates the space in
Speaker 1: the bowl as the steam condenses into water, and then
Speaker 1: the atmosphere comes in. And this is such a This
Speaker 1: a wonderful, mundane little way of seeing something strange and amazing.
Speaker 1: The power of atmospheric pressure. Yeah, you know it, you know. Normally,
Speaker 1: when I observed this, my main thought is, oh, I
Speaker 1: hope I don't break the plastic top to my glass
Speaker 1: of food storage container, because I'm down to like one
Speaker 1: plastic top. They're all eight glass containers. But but yeah, this,
Speaker 1: this is an interesting way of looking at it, to
Speaker 1: see it as the footprint of the atmosphere, the weight
Speaker 1: of air actually observed. It's funny how it can be
Speaker 1: so powerful and we're so blind to it most of
Speaker 1: the time. I want to tell a related story about
Speaker 1: a about a seventeenth century Prussian mayor. How about we
Speaker 1: go there. Okay, so this guy is named Otto von Garica.
Speaker 1: He lived from sixteen o two to sixteen eighty six.
Speaker 1: And uh. In addition to being a lawyer and a politician,
Speaker 1: he was, as I said, a mayor. He was an
Speaker 1: important engineer and physicist in history, and he had all
Speaker 1: kinds of scientific accomplishments. For example, in the sixteen sixties
Speaker 1: he invented what is believed to be the world's first
Speaker 1: known electrostatic generator, which is a device for generating electrical potential. Now,
Speaker 1: we talked a bit, you remember, Robert, about the history
Speaker 1: of electrostatic generators on the I think it was the
Speaker 1: episode about the electric arc thesis, right, Yes, I believe so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But for a brief refresher, these early generators were generally
Speaker 1: based on friction, kind of like how you can build
Speaker 1: up an electric charge on yourself by scuffing around on
Speaker 1: a carpet. Von Garrika discovered that he could build up
Speaker 1: a charge on a ball of sulfur if he rotated
Speaker 1: it rapidly with a crank to rub against things. And
Speaker 1: he eventually discovered that building up a charge in this
Speaker 1: way could cause the sulfur ball to glow in the dark.
Speaker 1: But this wasn't Von Gerrika's only cool invention. Demonstrating like
Speaker 1: the potential of vast hidden powers in the world. He
Speaker 1: was also interested in the power of vacuums and voids,
Speaker 1: and in the weight of the atmosphere, which, as we
Speaker 1: were just saying, usually goes unnoticed by us. So Von
Speaker 1: Garrika was the mayor of a city called Magdeburg, and
Speaker 1: around sixteen forty nine or sixteen fifty or so he
Speaker 1: invented the first known air pump which could be used
Speaker 1: to remove gas from a closed container. And by using
Speaker 1: this pump to create a partial vacuum, he was able
Speaker 1: to conduct fascinating research on the nature of voids in
Speaker 1: empty space. For example, he discovered that light could pass
Speaker 1: through a vacuum, but sound could not, and like so,
Speaker 1: given what was known the in the sixteen fifties, how
Speaker 1: could that be? You know what? What was causing that fascinating?
Speaker 1: But then also in a series of public experiments following this,
Speaker 1: he demonstrated the power of a vacuum, or more precisely,
Speaker 1: the power exerted on a vacuum by air pressure, in
Speaker 1: a really awesome way, with an experimental apparatus that came
Speaker 1: to be known as the Magdeburg hemispheres. So Von Garica
Speaker 1: had this air pump of his and he created two
Speaker 1: precisely fitted copper hemispheres to like hollow half spheres that together,
Speaker 1: if you fit them together, they would make a closed
Speaker 1: hollow sphere that was about thirty five and a half
Speaker 1: centimeters in diameter. And these spheres were constructed with a
Speaker 1: valve so that they could when they were pressed together
Speaker 1: to create an enclosure. Varna could attach his air pump
Speaker 1: to the valve to force the gas out of the
Speaker 1: hollow sphere and create a partial vacuum inside. And here's
Speaker 1: the mind blowing part. Once the gas had been pumped
Speaker 1: out of the space between the two hemispheres, these copper
Speaker 1: domes could not be pulled apart, even when they were
Speaker 1: tied to horses pulling them in opposite directions. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and I want to be clear, like, there's no
Speaker 1: device holding the two hemispheres together. They weren't glued or
Speaker 1: latched together or anything. You just press them together with
Speaker 1: a relatively air tight seal, pump the air out of
Speaker 1: the middle, and they stay so stuck together that even
Speaker 1: horses pulling at each end couldn't separate them. So we
Speaker 1: ask again, what's holding these half spheres together, just kind
Speaker 1: of like what's pulling the lid of the microwave container down,
Speaker 1: just as was the case with the bull in the microwave.
Speaker 1: If you're imagining some force inside the spheres sucking them together,
Speaker 1: that's not accurate. There is no real sucking in a way,
Speaker 1: sucking is an illusion which you know there'll be a
Speaker 1: good motivational poster almost um. The real force here was
Speaker 1: the weight of the atmosphere, the pressure difference between the
Speaker 1: outside of the sphere and the inside. So you can
Speaker 1: sort of imagine the Earth's atmosphere reaching down with two huge,
Speaker 1: invisible fingers and pressing the two hemispheres together while the
Speaker 1: horses tried to pull them apart. And to separate the
Speaker 1: spheres you would have to overpower that push of the atmosphere. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, an easy way to separate them is just
Speaker 1: to just open the valve and allow the air to
Speaker 1: fill the sphere um and then of course they'd come
Speaker 1: apart instantly because the pressure pushing out from the inside
Speaker 1: would be the same as the pressure pushing in from
Speaker 1: the outside. And that I love these kind of experiments,
Speaker 1: the kind that suddenly demonstrate in sharp relief amazing forces
Speaker 1: that are always there. They're always present, but they're invisible
Speaker 1: to us from moment to moment. An atmosphere pressure is
Speaker 1: like this, it's our whole world. We spend our whole
Speaker 1: lives in it. We evolved in it, we're adapted to it.
Speaker 1: It permeates our bodies, so we don't feel or notice it.
Speaker 1: It's just completely invisible to us. But if you merely
Speaker 1: create a vacuum inside two half spheres, the familiar becomes
Speaker 1: strange again, and these fingers of the atmosphere come pressing
Speaker 1: down and the sky becomes so heavy it's kind of frightening. Well,
Speaker 1: let's break things down a little bit into about pressure itself.
Speaker 1: What is pressure? Well, pressure is actually fairly simple. Has
Speaker 1: two components. It has force, and it has an area
Speaker 1: over which that force is applied. And this is why
Speaker 1: you often hear pressure explained in terms of like pounds
Speaker 1: per square inch. Right, So pressure is not Pressure is
Speaker 1: not just the amount of force pressing on something, but
Speaker 1: where that force is being applied. So one way of
Speaker 1: thinking about this is like, why do so many weapons
Speaker 1: have sharp points and blades or not just weapons, I
Speaker 1: mean any kind of like piercing object it's because they
Speaker 1: take the force of your swing or thrust or push
Speaker 1: and they apply it to a smaller surface area, increasing
Speaker 1: the pressure on that surface area and usually doing more
Speaker 1: damage or getting through what you're trying to separate. Now,
Speaker 1: when we start then up applying this to Earth's atmosphere, uh,
Speaker 1: it really gets fascinating. Uh. And this is a topic
Speaker 1: I I really enjoyed researching several years back when I
Speaker 1: wrote a piece called How Weather Works for How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: probably one of my favorite articles that ever worked on UM.
Speaker 1: And one of my sources on that was a book
Speaker 1: called The Atmosphere Planetary Heat Engine from twenty from two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven by Gregory L. Vault and so member
Speaker 1: some of these figures are his figures, I believe from
Speaker 1: that book. But UM, the Earth's atmosphere, if you were
Speaker 1: to weigh it, it would weigh in at a whopping
Speaker 1: five point five quadrillion tons. That's a fourteen zeros trailing
Speaker 1: after it. So you know that's that's a lot of mass.
Speaker 1: And it's actually it's the driving force behind air pressure.
Speaker 1: So one one analogy that I kind of like to
Speaker 1: turn to here is like if you imagine a squad
Speaker 1: of cheerleaders forming a human pyramid. The cheerleaders on the
Speaker 1: bottom have to bear the weight of all the other
Speaker 1: cheerleaders on top of them, while the cheerleader on the
Speaker 1: top doesn't have to bear, you know, any of the weight.
Speaker 1: A similar situation exists in the atmosphere. The air is
Speaker 1: least pressurized at the edge of space, where it's a
Speaker 1: little or nothing pressing it down. The air at sea level, however,
Speaker 1: is weighed down by all the air on top of it.
Speaker 1: Um like those pool poor cheerleaders shoring up the pyramid.
Speaker 1: All this pressure presses the molecules in the lower atmosphere
Speaker 1: closer together, and that means that the higher the air pressure,
Speaker 1: the greater the air density. And for this reason alone,
Speaker 1: fifty of Earth's air exists below an altitude of three
Speaker 1: miles or five kilometers, right. And that's one reason it
Speaker 1: actually becomes kind of difficult to say exactly where the
Speaker 1: atmosphere stops, right, because the atmosphere doesn't there's not like
Speaker 1: a dividing line where it stops. We've kind of imposed
Speaker 1: some arbitrary dividing lines where we say, well, conventionally the
Speaker 1: atmosphere stops here, but it just keeps getting thinner and
Speaker 1: thinner until you go up until you basically realize, well,
Speaker 1: I guess I would call this empty space. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: There's not like a membrane or anything up there. So
Speaker 1: standing at sea level, the atmosphere exerts, on average, a
Speaker 1: pressure of fourteen point seven pounds or six point seven
Speaker 1: kilograms against every square inch of your skin. Now, I've
Speaker 1: also seen this figure slightly differently before the National Oceanic
Speaker 1: and Atmospheric Administration. Uh they say fourteen point five pounds
Speaker 1: per square inch, and uh per square inch it's p
Speaker 1: s I. So when you hear say P s I later,
Speaker 1: that's what we're referring to. I find this interesting to
Speaker 1: think about. Okay, fifteen pounds per square inch again that
Speaker 1: we just totally take for granted. And I know each
Speaker 1: of us recently acquired a fifteen pound gravity blanket. This
Speaker 1: is not a paid plug, not a paid plug, but
Speaker 1: just to to illustrate, it's a blanket the ways fifteen
Speaker 1: pounds and you pull it over your body and it
Speaker 1: presses down on you and this kind of like uh
Speaker 1: comforting in human hug and uh So when I was
Speaker 1: researching this, and I was adding that into my notes
Speaker 1: about the fifteen pounds, I was like, oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: I gotta I gotta bust the gravity blanket out and
Speaker 1: and feel what fifteen pounds feels like, or rather what
Speaker 1: fifteen additional pounds feels like. Yeah, but there's one of
Speaker 1: those for every square inch of your body. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's it's crazy to think about that. Now we've
Speaker 1: already sort of explored this, but you you might begin
Speaker 1: to wonder about Okay, so there's a lot of square
Speaker 1: inches on my body, uh, and fifteen pounds alone that
Speaker 1: can start to feel pretty heavy, even distributed just over
Speaker 1: the entire thing in a gravity blanket. How come I
Speaker 1: don't feel just constantly weighed down by the atmosphere. Why
Speaker 1: isn't it a crushing force that prevents me from doing anything? Well,
Speaker 1: I guess there's kind of like two answers to that.
Speaker 1: I mean, one is this is the norm, this is
Speaker 1: what you are used to. And then there's also you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've seen it written. You know that basically you're
Speaker 1: the fluids in your body are pressing out with the
Speaker 1: same force, so everything is there's equilibrium there, right, we
Speaker 1: are at equilibrium in this pressure. It's what our bodies
Speaker 1: are evolved to existent. If you brought in, you know,
Speaker 1: an alien from outer space that I was living, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I was living in a super low pressure environment.
Speaker 1: That's how its body had been formed, and then you
Speaker 1: brought it to the surface of Earth, it might well
Speaker 1: be crushed like a like a tin can a right,
Speaker 1: and then there might be issues with with the density
Speaker 1: because one of the issues too, is that if you
Speaker 1: venture above sea level air pressure uh, and it's corresponding
Speaker 1: density will decrease. That's why it's more difficult to breathe
Speaker 1: a higher altitudes. Yeah, that's why it would be you know,
Speaker 1: you've you've probably heard stats like if you were to
Speaker 1: teleport to the top of Mount Everest, Uh, the difficulty
Speaker 1: you would you would have in getting enough air into
Speaker 1: your body to stay alive. Oh yeah, And this is
Speaker 1: this is something that's really interesting. I want to linger
Speaker 1: on this for a moment, because we've established that we've
Speaker 1: got this really powerful, fascinating force of atmospheric pressure always
Speaker 1: affecting us, but we don't normally notice it because we're
Speaker 1: we're acclimatized to it, we're in equilibrium with it um
Speaker 1: and we only normally notice its effects by its absence.
Speaker 1: When we're at low pressure, that's when when you start
Speaker 1: to notice what air pressure is. And of course, as
Speaker 1: you're saying, when you climb a mountain and reach a higher,
Speaker 1: high enough altitude, atmospheric pressure is lower. There's less atmosphere
Speaker 1: sussing down from above, so the air is less dense,
Speaker 1: meaning every time you take a breath, you literally get
Speaker 1: fewer oxygen molecules. They're just it's less dense. You're getting
Speaker 1: less with each pull. Yeah. This is also the very
Speaker 1: reason that in your airplane safety videos they stress that
Speaker 1: if the cabin loses pressure, because little masks are going
Speaker 1: to fall down and you need to put them on
Speaker 1: in order to keep breathing right or you will very
Speaker 1: quickly encounter hypoxia, you know, like lack of oxygen and
Speaker 1: the breaths you take, and that of course can lead
Speaker 1: to all kinds of bad stuff in the body. You
Speaker 1: need oxygen continuously immediately. And of course, so what this
Speaker 1: means when you get up to a high altitude, as
Speaker 1: it can lead to a heavy breathing in order to
Speaker 1: compensate for the lack of oxygen and each breath, uh
Speaker 1: and all kinds of stuff weakness, dizziness, potentially dehydration or
Speaker 1: even loss of consciousness. I've experienced high altitude environments. I
Speaker 1: assume you have at some point as well, and it's
Speaker 1: it's a kind of alarming feeling, you know, like you
Speaker 1: suddenly go up like ten ft worth of stairs and
Speaker 1: like normally that wouldn't be a problem, but you're start
Speaker 1: you're feeling lightheaded. And I remember encountering this on a
Speaker 1: trip to Arizona where we be We began in Phoenix
Speaker 1: and then we were heading up um, you know, rising
Speaker 1: in altitude as we were heading eventually towards the canyon,
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon, UH. And I think we're somewhere in
Speaker 1: your Flagstaff where we stopped, got out and had his
Speaker 1: beautiful walk. The leaves were golden. But I also think
Speaker 1: we were like it was like we we that the
Speaker 1: altitude changed as such that we felt maybe like a
Speaker 1: little more exhausted by the walk and everything seemed like
Speaker 1: a little more magical in a weird way. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely experienced this sum when I was up up
Speaker 1: in Canada, when like we went on the hike to
Speaker 1: the Burgess Shale National Park area and uh to see
Speaker 1: the trilobyte beds up there, which if you haven't done,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend, but researched the hike before you do it.
Speaker 1: But also I've experienced this like in New Mexico and
Speaker 1: the mountains around Albuquerque and Santa Fe which can get
Speaker 1: really high elevation sition and you really start to feel it.
Speaker 1: Of course, altitude sickness can vary a lot in where
Speaker 1: it sets in. It's usually said that it begins somewhere
Speaker 1: around fifteen hundred to three thousand meters above sea level,
Speaker 1: but it varies a lot from person to person. And
Speaker 1: I kind of wonder about something. This got me thinking
Speaker 1: about the prevalence of beliefs about the sacred or religious
Speaker 1: significance of mountain tops. Like so, there are tons and
Speaker 1: tons of examples of sacred mountain tops or beliefs about
Speaker 1: the religious significance of mountain peaks around the world. There's,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, familiar one to us, mount Mount Olympus,
Speaker 1: the home to the gods in Greek mythology. But they're
Speaker 1: just literally hundreds of sacred and holy mountains around the
Speaker 1: world that are either homes of the gods or peaks
Speaker 1: of sacred pilgrimage, or places where people go to meditate,
Speaker 1: you know, near mountain peaks, mountain top monasteries considered sacred
Speaker 1: in some forms of Buddhism and all that. Um I
Speaker 1: was thinking about Mount Kailash or Kailassa into bed Ah.
Speaker 1: So you're saying mountaintops where the air is thin and
Speaker 1: the gods are near. Yeah, I wonder. Now I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: but there could be a lot of reasons for belief
Speaker 1: in the mountaintops being homes of the gods or sacred
Speaker 1: places in general. And I think there's one clearer piece
Speaker 1: of evidence that not all beliefs about sacred mountain tops
Speaker 1: have to do with altitude, because many of the holy
Speaker 1: mountains of the world aren't even that tall. I was
Speaker 1: thinking about there's one in Japan called, I think Mountain
Speaker 1: Mihwa that's like not even five So it's clearly not
Speaker 1: like an altitude sickness thing going on there. So there's
Speaker 1: obviously there are obviously other things contributing to these types
Speaker 1: of beliefs. But I wonder if one factor contributing to
Speaker 1: the widespread prevalence of belief in holy mountains is altitude sickness.
Speaker 1: As you climb toward the top of a very tall mountain,
Speaker 1: you're very likely to experience heavy breathing, weakness, dizziness, dehydration,
Speaker 1: loss of consciousness. And I can even imagine these like
Speaker 1: mundane types of physiological obstacles presenting too ancient mountain climbers
Speaker 1: a kind of invisible power of magic or repelling force
Speaker 1: that attempts to bar entry or repel you from the
Speaker 1: sacred domain of the gods. Interesting. Oh yeah, I like
Speaker 1: this hypothesis and actually does go farther than that. Like
Speaker 1: Apart from the mere hypoxic conditions caused by low air
Speaker 1: pressure at altitude, there are plenty of records of high altitudes,
Speaker 1: especially like above six thousand meters according to a nine
Speaker 1: study by Bruger at all that I was looking at
Speaker 1: high altitudes causing fascinating psychological effects like so esthetic illusions,
Speaker 1: which are when you imagine there are distortions in the
Speaker 1: schema of your body and various forms of hallucinations such
Speaker 1: as hearing voices. You know people hearing voices on everest
Speaker 1: You might have ye, definitely yeah, Or there's a common
Speaker 1: one of sensing the presence of an unseen companion on
Speaker 1: the climb. Sometimes known as third Man's and so I
Speaker 1: don't know about that, but that's an interesting hypothesis to
Speaker 1: work with, And I think maybe we should come back
Speaker 1: and do a whole episode in the future about the
Speaker 1: science of sacred mountains and mountain top psychology and and
Speaker 1: maybe explore a little bit further whether there's something to
Speaker 1: this idea. Huh uh. It makes me wonder too about
Speaker 1: the science fictional applications here where you could have say,
Speaker 1: a society where um, they basically have a low air
Speaker 1: density chambers in which one uh visits to to meditate
Speaker 1: and receive the gods. Oh yeah, I wonder kind of
Speaker 1: a riff on a recent Peter Watts short story that
Speaker 1: I read called a Word for Heathens. Oh man, yeah,
Speaker 1: you made me read that one. That was great. It's
Speaker 1: sort of uh well, I don't want to spoil what
Speaker 1: it's about. If you're into Peter Watts, you should check
Speaker 1: it out. Yeah, yeah, it's it's in his a short
Speaker 1: story collection of his. It came out in recent years.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break. But when we come back, we're gonna go
Speaker 1: underwater and we're gonna talk about water pressure. Thank you
Speaker 1: thank alright, we're back. All right. So we've been talking
Speaker 1: about atmospheric pressure so far. I don't know if we
Speaker 1: ever really announced the topic today. We we just generally
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about some thoughts about pressure pressurized environments
Speaker 1: or unpressurized environments, and so we've been talking so far
Speaker 1: about the hidden effects of atmospheric pressure. But we should
Speaker 1: talk about water pressure because that's where the real pressure
Speaker 1: comes in on Earth. Absolutely, So yeah, when we go
Speaker 1: into water, pressure increases. And because the ocean is also
Speaker 1: a massive layer on the Earth, held in place by gravity,
Speaker 1: and it weighs a lot as well. Uh, estimated weight
Speaker 1: of the ocean is generally generally's generally the standard estimation
Speaker 1: is three hundred and twenty six million trillion gallons. That's
Speaker 1: three two six with eighteen zeros on it. Zeros it is.
Speaker 1: But by the way, this is a something that is
Speaker 1: that that I found kind of fascinate. Water is practically incompressible,
Speaker 1: but it can be compressed with great difficulty for industrial purposes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I've usually seen it expressed as liquid water
Speaker 1: being incompressible, whereas gas is compressible. Yeah, here's another fun
Speaker 1: fact about just the size of the ocean. If you
Speaker 1: removed all the continents and just had our oceans. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the global ocean itself covering a uniform plane
Speaker 1: of rock. The entire planet would be covered in a
Speaker 1: two mile deep ocean. That's just how much there is.
Speaker 1: Um starts to make you a little nervous. Yeah, so um.
Speaker 1: Basically though, everything I said earlier about about the cheerleaders
Speaker 1: and atmosphere holds true for the for the ocean as well.
Speaker 1: Venture into the sunlit shallows and you feel a gradual
Speaker 1: increase in the pressure around you. Uh. I mean all
Speaker 1: you have to do is go underwater in a swimming
Speaker 1: pool or swim down from the surface while snorkeling to
Speaker 1: fill the pressure on your ear drums. That's hydrostatic pressure
Speaker 1: the foce per unit area exerted by a liquid on
Speaker 1: an object. Now, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
Speaker 1: for every thirty three feet or ten point zero six
Speaker 1: meters you descend into the ocean, the pressure increases by
Speaker 1: fourteen point five p s I and that was the
Speaker 1: same as the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level,
Speaker 1: which is why this is usually referred to as the
Speaker 1: unit of measure one atmosphere exactly. Yeah, you go down there,
Speaker 1: So you go down thirty three ft, you've got one
Speaker 1: atmosphere of pressure. You go down sixty six ft, you
Speaker 1: have two atmospheres of pressure. So at a depth of
Speaker 1: five thousand meters, the pressure will be approximately five hundred atmospheres,
Speaker 1: or again five hundred times greater than the pressure at
Speaker 1: sea level. The average ocean depth is about twelve thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred sixty six feet or about thirty eight hundreds,
Speaker 1: so that's roughly three d eight atmospheres of pressure. And
Speaker 1: the greatest ocean depth is what thirty six thousand, two
Speaker 1: hundred feet uh over eleven thousand meters, so that's roughly
Speaker 1: um eleven hundred atmospheres of pressure. And I've seen I've
Speaker 1: seen the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench
Speaker 1: listed as ten seventy a t M. Well that lines
Speaker 1: up about right. But I mean the point here being
Speaker 1: you can't I think it is sort of impossible for
Speaker 1: you to imagine the pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 1: You don't have something that it feels like to compare
Speaker 1: that too. But it is crushing pressure. Obviously, if an
Speaker 1: organism were to go into that that was not biologically
Speaker 1: adapted for it, it would be just instant death, just
Speaker 1: destroy you. Yeah, it's it's difficult to really grasp even
Speaker 1: in even in like our better works of science fiction.
Speaker 1: I mean, we mentioned Peter Watts already. Peter Watts has
Speaker 1: written a uh, several different books that take place in
Speaker 1: ocean depths. Is novel Starfish, especially that I've discussed on
Speaker 1: the show before. Uh, there's a frequent mention of the
Speaker 1: underwater habitats and the and the the Rifters on that
Speaker 1: having to cope with three atmospheres of pressure in the
Speaker 1: area that they're um hanging out and uh, and there's
Speaker 1: also in a later Rifter Books Books book he describes
Speaker 1: the crazy cutting potential of a strip of water shooting
Speaker 1: through a crack in a hole, how it could potentially
Speaker 1: slice a character's arm right off. Um. And that is
Speaker 1: that ill? You think that that is accurate? I think so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean based on what we're talking about earlier about
Speaker 1: potential industrial um applications of you know, high high pressure
Speaker 1: water streams plus Watts you know, tends to get the
Speaker 1: science right. I tend to. I tend to trust him
Speaker 1: on on the science and his books. Uh well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I think about the fact that
Speaker 1: there are actually water jet cutters, like we're in industrial
Speaker 1: water saws. There's also an interesting account from William Beebe,
Speaker 1: you know, the the the inventor and tester of the
Speaker 1: bathosphere that we've discussed in the show before. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you haven't heard our Bathosphere episodes, you should go back
Speaker 1: and listen to those. But the basic idea, right, he
Speaker 1: got in a he got in a giant metal ball
Speaker 1: and just descended into the ocean. Right. And there's a
Speaker 1: there's one he wrote about all of this, And there's
Speaker 1: one particular passage that's frequently brought up as an example
Speaker 1: of extreme uh you know, the the of of extreme
Speaker 1: water pressure and this one that was actually included on
Speaker 1: the n O a A website. Um, but basically this
Speaker 1: would have occurred what I think nineteen thirty two, in
Speaker 1: which they sent the bathosphere down this again this uh,
Speaker 1: this iron beach ball of a of a vessel with
Speaker 1: one window with the one yeah, I think later they
Speaker 1: had three, right, Yeah, but at any rate, uh, just
Speaker 1: like these quartz portals to to look out of, right,
Speaker 1: and uh so they were going to test it out.
Speaker 1: Nobody aboard. They lowered it down to three thousand feet,
Speaker 1: and then the following happens quote. It was apparent that
Speaker 1: something was very wrong, and as the bathosphere swung clear,
Speaker 1: so they just they just pulled it out of the ocean.
Speaker 1: After this descent, I saw a needle of water shooting
Speaker 1: across the face of the port window. Weighing much more
Speaker 1: than she should have, she came over the side and
Speaker 1: was lowered to the deck. Looking through one of the
Speaker 1: good windows, I could see that she was almost full
Speaker 1: of water. They were curious ripples on the top of
Speaker 1: the water, and I knew that the space above was
Speaker 1: filled with air, but such air as no human being
Speaker 1: could tall rate. For a moment, unceasingly, the thin stream
Speaker 1: of water and air drove obliquely across the outer face
Speaker 1: of the quartz. I began to unscrew the giant wing
Speaker 1: bolt in the center of the door, and after the
Speaker 1: first few turns, a strange, high singing came forth. Then
Speaker 1: a fine missed steam like inconsistency shot out a needle
Speaker 1: of steam, then another and another. This warned me that
Speaker 1: I should have sensed when I looked through the window
Speaker 1: that the contents of the bathosphere were under terrific pressure.
Speaker 1: I cleared the deck in front of the door of
Speaker 1: everyone's staff and crew. One motion picture camera was placed
Speaker 1: on the upper deck. In a second when close by
Speaker 1: but well to one side of the bathosphere. Carefully, little
Speaker 1: by little, two of us turned the brass handles soaked
Speaker 1: with the spray, and I listened as the high musical
Speaker 1: tone of impatient, confined elements gradually descended the scale a
Speaker 1: quartertone or less at each slight turn. Realizing what might happen,
Speaker 1: we leaned back as far as possible from the line
Speaker 1: of fire. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the bolt was
Speaker 1: torn from our hands, and the math of heavy metal
Speaker 1: shot across the deck like a shell from a gun.
Speaker 1: The trajectory was almost straight, and the brass bolt hurtled
Speaker 1: into the steel winch thirty feet across the deck and
Speaker 1: sheared a half inch notch, gouged out by the harder metal.
Speaker 1: This was followed by a solid cylinder of water, which
Speaker 1: slackened after a while to be to a cataract, pouring
Speaker 1: out of the whole of the door. Some air mingled
Speaker 1: with the water, looking like hot steam instead of compressed
Speaker 1: air shooting through the ice cold water. If I had
Speaker 1: been in the way, I would have been decapitated. Wow. So,
Speaker 1: if I'm understanding correctly what he's saying happened here is
Speaker 1: they lowered it down without any people in it, to
Speaker 1: this greater depth than they normally would have allowed it
Speaker 1: to get down to see what would happen, and it
Speaker 1: somehow sprung a leak, despite the fact that this is
Speaker 1: a super reinforced uh you know, like it's not like
Speaker 1: it had a lot of components to fail. It's just
Speaker 1: a metal ball with like extremely thick windows. But something
Speaker 1: happened in the courts of the window and water got
Speaker 1: in and because of the pressure where it was, not
Speaker 1: only did it fill with high pressure water, but the
Speaker 1: air inside it would have been super compressed by the
Speaker 1: water filling it up at such high pressure. So it's
Speaker 1: basically like a bomb they had they had pulled up
Speaker 1: into the boat. Yeah, because normally the idea is it
Speaker 1: contains surface level air pressure within this high pressure ocean
Speaker 1: deep but but it kind of reverse things, right, so
Speaker 1: when they pull it back up, it's this steel ball
Speaker 1: containing all of this high pressured air and water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's something very frightening about that, like terrified to think, Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know about just like the the the killing
Speaker 1: power of water and air under such high pressure that
Speaker 1: there aren't like explosives in this thing. There's not like
Speaker 1: a you know, it's not a gun or a bomb
Speaker 1: that has chemicals and it may do it's just the pressure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well and and but but it's yeah, when you have
Speaker 1: situations through human technology to create this vast deferential like
Speaker 1: a difference in pressure water pressure or air pressure that
Speaker 1: should be separated by dit by greater distances. And indeed
Speaker 1: that's where we see some of the more unfortunate accidents
Speaker 1: that have occurred with like, ah, like rapid deep pressure ization,
Speaker 1: which we may touch on a little bit in a bit,
Speaker 1: but we're not going to get you know, into a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of gordy details on that matter here, well
Speaker 1: except maybe a bit as it concerns fish. Yes, well
Speaker 1: that's true. But uh but but just you know, as
Speaker 1: long as we're talking about atmosphere in the deep here
Speaker 1: that it brings up an important fact that increased pressure
Speaker 1: changes how our body interacts with certain gases, namely nitrogen.
Speaker 1: Increased pressure allows more oxygen and nitrogen to dissolve into
Speaker 1: the blood into the blood stream and it end at
Speaker 1: a mirror a hundred feet. Nitrogen levels can reach dangerous levels,
Speaker 1: resulting in nitrogen narcosis if not managed. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: actually goes beyond just like respiraated nitrogen and air. There
Speaker 1: are multiple types of molecules and chemicals inside the body
Speaker 1: that actually take on different properties at different pressure. It's
Speaker 1: kind of the same way that if you're experimenting in
Speaker 1: a laboratory, you can change the properties of a chemical
Speaker 1: or molecule by increasing or decreasing its temperature. You can
Speaker 1: also change the properties of a molecule, compound or whatever
Speaker 1: by increasing or decreasing the pressure which it rests. And
Speaker 1: uh and so yeah, we'll we'll talk about that more
Speaker 1: in just a minute. I was looking up, you know,
Speaker 1: a little bit more about the effects of diving on
Speaker 1: the body, and according to the Diver's Alert Network, increased
Speaker 1: levels of oxygen can cause will cause a vasal constriction,
Speaker 1: which increases your blood pressure and reduces your heart rate
Speaker 1: and heart output. So I imagine that just means like
Speaker 1: it's shrinking the blood vessels, right, it's making them tighter.
Speaker 1: They also point out that increased levels of carbon dioxide,
Speaker 1: which may accumulate in the body when you exercise during
Speaker 1: a dive. Uh due to reduced pulmonary ventilation caused by
Speaker 1: dense gases. This can increase the flow of blood to
Speaker 1: your brain, which can speed up oxygen toxicity. If you're
Speaker 1: breathing a hyperoxic gasness mix one with an elevated level
Speaker 1: of oxygen. Okay, so would it be normal? I guess
Speaker 1: that divers would have in their in their breathing apparatus
Speaker 1: what is it called the tanks or whatever, a mixture
Speaker 1: that has more oxygen the normal air does. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: I believe. So. I've never been scuba diving, I've I've
Speaker 1: only only done snorkeling. On my recent trip to believe,
Speaker 1: I was around a number of scuba divers and it
Speaker 1: is I did spend a fair amount of time like
Speaker 1: sort of thinking about the differences between the people that
Speaker 1: were there to dive and the people who were there
Speaker 1: to snorkel and um, you know, and a lot of
Speaker 1: it does come down to the fact that like snork
Speaker 1: guing is pretty simple technology. Um and and I love it.
Speaker 1: You know, you're just you're getting the water and you're
Speaker 1: there you don't have to worry about too much. You know,
Speaker 1: you just make sure you're not brushing up against coral
Speaker 1: and spit out the salt water when it comes down
Speaker 1: the snork that sort of thing. But but when you
Speaker 1: get into two diving, I mean, they're all these careful
Speaker 1: considerations that have to be made, and you know, I
Speaker 1: have to keep track of your time and your your
Speaker 1: bree thing. I mean, it is, uh, it's and it's
Speaker 1: a whole enterprise. We could we could easily do an
Speaker 1: entire episode just on the science of scuba diving. Actually,
Speaker 1: in one of the books that I recommended in our
Speaker 1: summer Reading episode last year, The Soul of an Octopus
Speaker 1: by Sigh Montgomery, there's a there's a whole section in
Speaker 1: there that's sort of like a memoir of UH learning
Speaker 1: how to dive with with scuba gear and stuff, because
Speaker 1: just because of an interest in UH octopuses and cephalopods
Speaker 1: and wanting to get closer to them and see them
Speaker 1: in the ocean. And it's it's not as easy as
Speaker 1: you would think. It's like an arduous journey, especially when
Speaker 1: whatever you're diving for at was going to ask you
Speaker 1: to dive in less than ideal conditions. Uh. Fun fact
Speaker 1: that trip to believes. Uh, the the place I stayed
Speaker 1: had a small assortment of books and magazines, like these
Speaker 1: places tend to do, and that that book The Soul
Speaker 1: of an Octopus was was one of them. Oh maybe
Speaker 1: because they heard our recommendation well or just you know,
Speaker 1: but probably more than like people that are willing into
Speaker 1: scuba and diving uh um and and snorkeling, I guess
Speaker 1: may occasionally bring books of that nature. I'll say it again.
Speaker 1: If you want to cry about an octopus, read that book.
Speaker 1: No joke. Now, we've talked mainly about about humans here
Speaker 1: and a little bit about octopuses, but plenty of other
Speaker 1: creatures are adapted to regular jaunts to fairly impressive depths
Speaker 1: or even of course permanent residency in high pressure waters.
Speaker 1: So sperm whales for instance, which we've we've covered fairly
Speaker 1: recently on the show. Um, you know, they can dive
Speaker 1: down to depths of seven thousand feet or so. Uh
Speaker 1: and and uh, this is a really impressive anatomical process
Speaker 1: that we we talk a little bit about in that episode.
Speaker 1: But like one of the things that their bodies do
Speaker 1: is that they their lungs collapse to copes with the
Speaker 1: cope with the pressure. Yeah, um, I mean that's actually
Speaker 1: even so we're about to talk about organisms that live
Speaker 1: permanently in the deep seas, but the ones like sperm
Speaker 1: whales that go up and down, like they go all
Speaker 1: the way to the surface to breathe and then go
Speaker 1: down seven thousand feet. I mean, what that is something
Speaker 1: that's especially hard to imagine for you know, without the
Speaker 1: kind of biological adaptations that they have to sustain it.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be hard to imagine, especially given stuff we're
Speaker 1: about to talk about in just a minute here. Yeah, difficult,
Speaker 1: difficult for a landsman like like us to imagine for sure. Um.
Speaker 1: But then of course, yeah, you've got all these deep
Speaker 1: sea organisms that are permanently adapted to pressure that is
Speaker 1: that boggles the mind, is just so crushing at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the ocean. Yeah. So yeah, deep sea fish
Speaker 1: that are adapted to high pressures, you know, generally, namely
Speaker 1: we're talking about like the mere fact that they don't
Speaker 1: have air pockets inside their body like we do, right,
Speaker 1: they don't have lungs full of air or more importantly,
Speaker 1: swim bladders. Yes, uh, there, there's actually like a whole
Speaker 1: host of of things that come into into play with
Speaker 1: with deep water adaptations. Like it's you know, it's easy
Speaker 1: to sort of like think casually about it and think, well,
Speaker 1: you know it's a thicker skin or you know, different
Speaker 1: oregan Uh, but you know, you get into like all
Speaker 1: of these molecular examples and proteins UM. Deep water organisms
Speaker 1: for instance, UM, they depend on something that's known as
Speaker 1: trimethyl amine in oxide, which seems to counter protein destabilizing
Speaker 1: effects of pressure. Yeah, that's sometimes known as t m
Speaker 1: A O. And the problem here is that, as we
Speaker 1: were saying a minute ago, certain types of molecules that
Speaker 1: are present in animal bodies anyway, actually become more toxic
Speaker 1: or more dangerous at greater pressure. And one of those,
Speaker 1: of course, is the compound of urea, which is in
Speaker 1: your body. You know, it's important in the renal system.
Speaker 1: Your kidneys deal with it. But t m AO is
Speaker 1: a protein stabilizer that helps protect the body against the
Speaker 1: toxic effects of urea at high pressure. So if you've
Speaker 1: got urea in your body, like a lot of deep
Speaker 1: water sharks do, and they're trying not to make that
Speaker 1: a poison inside their bodies, that hurts them. The t
Speaker 1: m AO stabilizes proteins and protects the body against it.
Speaker 1: But I've also reather this molecule only works to serve
Speaker 1: in depths. Basically, so extremely deep organisms, you know, many
Speaker 1: of which we really don't understand all that well yet. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have membranes that require extreme pressure, Like they fall
Speaker 1: apart without that pressure in place. Yeah, totally, though it
Speaker 1: seems so. It seems that when you are an organism
Speaker 1: that is adapted to the crushing depth of the bottom
Speaker 1: of the ocean, how you fare when you were brought
Speaker 1: into a lower pressure environment. That varies a lot from
Speaker 1: organism to organism. I was reading an article by the
Speaker 1: marine biologist and evolutionary ecologist Craig McClain where he talks
Speaker 1: about his experiences retrieving organisms for scientific research from the
Speaker 1: deep sea. You know, they'll put them sometimes in a
Speaker 1: canister and bring them up with a probe. And specifically
Speaker 1: he's addressing the question of whether deep sea organisms explode
Speaker 1: when you bring them up from the lower pressure environment
Speaker 1: of the surface, and it seems like for most organisms
Speaker 1: the answer is no, they don't explode. Though he does
Speaker 1: talk about his experiences. I think somehow we've mentioned this
Speaker 1: on the podcast before. His experience is trying to collect
Speaker 1: a specimen of a particular kind of red sea cucumber,
Speaker 1: which he says is always reduced to a quote thick
Speaker 1: red cool aid by the time it reaches the surface.
Speaker 1: So there may be some kind of explosion scenario going
Speaker 1: on with this organism in particular, and maybe some others.
Speaker 1: But with most deep sea organisms, when you bring them
Speaker 1: up from the high pressure environment of the deep sea
Speaker 1: to the surface, there's no pop. The more common immediate
Speaker 1: danger actually is temperature change. The deep sea is very
Speaker 1: very cold, around like zero to three degrees celsius usually,
Speaker 1: or about thirty two to thirty seven and a half
Speaker 1: degrease fahrenheit, and when an organism is adapted to that temperature,
Speaker 1: bringing it up to the warm surface can kill it fast.
Speaker 1: You know, it might be like boiling it. Though many
Speaker 1: deep sea organisms can survive if they're quickly moved to
Speaker 1: some kind of protective cold condition, But the question is
Speaker 1: how do they survive such an extreme change in pressure
Speaker 1: coming up from the bottom. And basically McClean says that
Speaker 1: their adaptations to deep pressure, many of which are sort
Speaker 1: of biochemical adaptations, having to do with like things happening
Speaker 1: at the cell level or enzymes in the body. Those
Speaker 1: don't happen to be adaptations of a kind that consequently
Speaker 1: makes them vulnerable to low pressure. It's just like you know,
Speaker 1: I think he uses the metaphor that if he puts
Speaker 1: a hat on to protect himself from the sun, that
Speaker 1: hat doesn't like hurt him when there is no sun. Um. However,
Speaker 1: these organisms that survived the pressure change from sea floor
Speaker 1: to surface have usually evolved to possess bodies without major
Speaker 1: gas pockets. And that's key. When we're talking about any
Speaker 1: fish or organism that has a gas pocket inside it,
Speaker 1: like a swim bladder, all bets are off. Then. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was reading a paper from Ding, Wagner and Popper
Speaker 1: titled titled the Inner Ear and It's coupling to the
Speaker 1: swim bladder in the deep sea fish uh Anti Mora rostrata,
Speaker 1: and they pointed out that they had to pull the
Speaker 1: specimens up from the deep really slowly because they wanted
Speaker 1: to try and preserve of the swim the swim bladder
Speaker 1: the creatures a swim bladder is adapted to deep water pressure,
Speaker 1: uh that they put it up slowly to avoid damaging it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's all kinds of interesting stuff out there about
Speaker 1: the swim bladder of fish and barrow trauma. You know,
Speaker 1: pressure related trauma. That's what barrow trauma is. So the
Speaker 1: swim bladder in fish is this gas filled chamber that
Speaker 1: allows a fish to essentially well, it allows several things.
Speaker 1: It allows a fish to rest at a certain depth
Speaker 1: without sinking and without expending energy to swim, to stay
Speaker 1: where it is. But it also can help in ascent
Speaker 1: or descent simply by inflating or deflating the bladder. So
Speaker 1: it can be a buoyancy stabilizer that helps the fish out.
Speaker 1: You don't always have to be pulling your muscles to
Speaker 1: go where you want to go if you have a
Speaker 1: swim bladder. But obviously a change in pressure will have
Speaker 1: an effect on a gas filled bladder inside an animal.
Speaker 1: It's like if you take a balloon to lower pressure,
Speaker 1: it expands, right. So what happens when a fish with
Speaker 1: a swim bladder, especially one adapted to very deep waters
Speaker 1: with high pressure, gets pulled up to the surface. Well.
Speaker 1: A common example can be seen in rock fish. Often,
Speaker 1: when rock fish are pulled up from the depth, the
Speaker 1: swim bladder inside its body. Cavity expands to become so
Speaker 1: large that it pushes the fish's stomach out through its mouth.
Speaker 1: And this looks almost mind rendingly grotesque, especially since it's
Speaker 1: often accompanied by Ronnie Cox in Total Recalls style bulging eyes.
Speaker 1: I've got some images for us here, and literally the
Speaker 1: stomach is just poking out of the fish's mouth. It
Speaker 1: looks like a huge tongue. It does. It looks like
Speaker 1: a big cartoonish tongue or level or at least the
Speaker 1: end of a sausage. And it's because the swim bladder
Speaker 1: has been so inflated by the low pressure environment. It's
Speaker 1: just like pushing out against all the other organs and
Speaker 1: the stomach escapes that that pressure of the swim bladder
Speaker 1: through the mouth, so it's it's averted. This is like
Speaker 1: pocket on your jeans pulled out inside out. Yes, there's
Speaker 1: something swelling up inside the fish because of the low pressure.
Speaker 1: It's that gas chamber and it's like pushing the guts
Speaker 1: out through the mouth. It's so gross. Uh. And obviously
Speaker 1: this can be traumatic and can kill the fish. But
Speaker 1: actually I was reading fish can sometimes survive this low
Speaker 1: pressure barrow trauma and UH and even survived the gut
Speaker 1: a version if quickly returned to their native native depth.
Speaker 1: This can be difficult though, because sometimes the gas distension
Speaker 1: here causes them to float and be unable to sink
Speaker 1: back down. But I've read that you can sometimes safely
Speaker 1: get them back down to depth just by like covering
Speaker 1: them with a weighted upside down milk crate on a line,
Speaker 1: which is then lowered back down to depth until the
Speaker 1: fish swims away on its own. But it sounds like
Speaker 1: a little extra work. But really, I mean, if you've
Speaker 1: if you've pulled the fish out of its natural habitat,
Speaker 1: you know it's it's it's the decent thing to do
Speaker 1: to either I guess eat it or put it back
Speaker 1: where it came from. Well, yeah, I mean it makes
Speaker 1: me think about there's this whole concept of catch and
Speaker 1: release fishing. You know, people do catching release, which is
Speaker 1: one thing if you're catching a bass in a lake,
Speaker 1: you know you not necessarily going to kill the fish
Speaker 1: if you catch it and then you take the hook
Speaker 1: out and you throw it back in. But with the
Speaker 1: you know, with a fish like this, if you pull
Speaker 1: it up and it's guts, get averted by the by
Speaker 1: the pressure change. Its stomach is sticking out, its mouth,
Speaker 1: its eyes are popping out, and then you just take
Speaker 1: it off the hook and throw it back in the water,
Speaker 1: and then it just floats on the surface and dies.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the what's the purpose of release? Then? Yeah, exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, again there's there's a lot more to the
Speaker 1: evolution of DC organisms. You know, it involves a number
Speaker 1: of evolutionary adaptations and involving tissues, membranes, proteins, etcetera. Like
Speaker 1: I said, Uh, And to come back to explosive decompression
Speaker 1: for a second, which is, you know, a matter all
Speaker 1: on its own. Uh. You know, this generally occurs when
Speaker 1: you have a rapid change in pressure, generally going from
Speaker 1: something like nine a t M to one a t
Speaker 1: M instantly. And these sorts of events occur due to
Speaker 1: malfunctions and closed systems. So we're talking about human technology here.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of misconceptions and myths about this
Speaker 1: sort of thing as well. But um, the the fatale
Speaker 1: by for dolphin diving bell accident is a frequently cited
Speaker 1: example of this sort of malfunction and the like the
Speaker 1: fatal nature of it like just really, how how destructive
Speaker 1: that can be to be a living organism exposed to
Speaker 1: such a drastic change. Yes, though it is. I would
Speaker 1: say there are a lot of myths out there about
Speaker 1: explosion in low pressure environments, Like the whole idea that
Speaker 1: you would explode if exposed to the void of empty space.
Speaker 1: That's not generally believed to be true. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: if you were exposed to the void of empty space,
Speaker 1: I mean, it would kill you, but not by making
Speaker 1: you explode. All right, Well, on that note, we're going
Speaker 1: to take another break, and when we come back, we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk a little bit about geologic pressure and pressure
Speaker 1: on other worlds. Thank alright, we're back. So we've we've
Speaker 1: discussed geologic pressure rather recently on the show, talking about
Speaker 1: tunnels and digging in the Earth and what's the deepest
Speaker 1: we've tunneled, and what's the what what is the depth
Speaker 1: the greatest depth that we've descended to. And so just
Speaker 1: to reiterate, geologists calculate that for every mile you dig down,
Speaker 1: the temperature rises fifteen degrees fahrenheit and the pressure increases
Speaker 1: at a rate of seven thousand, three hundred pounds per
Speaker 1: square inch go down deep enough and the temperature and
Speaker 1: pressure is enough to form diamonds. Uh. Now that the
Speaker 1: specifics of diamond formation. This is also something you know,
Speaker 1: we could easily devote an entire episode two, But I
Speaker 1: want to just read this quick bit from How Diamonds
Speaker 1: Work by Kevin Bonser on how stuff Works. I wrote
Speaker 1: a number of articles for that website back in the day,
Speaker 1: and and may still be for all I know. But
Speaker 1: here's the quote. Quote. Diamonds form about a hundred miles
Speaker 1: a hundred sixty one kilometers below the Earth's surface in
Speaker 1: the molten rock of the Earth's mantle, which provides the
Speaker 1: right amounts of pressure and heat to transform carbon into diamond.
Speaker 1: In order for a diamond to be created, carbon must
Speaker 1: be placed at least four hundred and thirty five thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirteen pounds per square inch or a
Speaker 1: p s i or thirty kilo bars of pressure at
Speaker 1: a temperature of at least seven two degrees fahrenheit or
Speaker 1: four hundred degrees celsius. So four hundred and thirty five
Speaker 1: thousand pounds per square inch. Yeah, it's hard to imagine
Speaker 1: pressure like that. I mean, this is unfortunately one of
Speaker 1: those cases where I think we can say the numbers,
Speaker 1: but there's nothing you can compare it to, right, There's
Speaker 1: no kind of you can't oh, okay, this was what
Speaker 1: it would feel like. You know, you just don't have
Speaker 1: a sensation based point of comparison for that kind of pressure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And now if we're talking about the core of the Earth,
Speaker 1: that's that's also crazy, because we're talking about a solid
Speaker 1: iron ball about one thousand, five hundred miles or kilometers
Speaker 1: in diameter. It's white hot, but the pressure is so
Speaker 1: high that the iron cannot melt um. And the temperature
Speaker 1: is probably between nine thousand and thirteen thousand degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 1: or five thousand and seven thousand degrees celsius. And as
Speaker 1: for the pressure, it's I've seen it list. I think
Speaker 1: there's a National Geographic dot com article about the Earth's interior.
Speaker 1: The pressure here would be somewhere between three hundred thirty
Speaker 1: and three hundred sixty giga pascal's giga pascals or um.
Speaker 1: That would also be uh three million, three hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: or somewhere between three million, three hundred thousand and three million,
Speaker 1: six hundred thousand a t m s. But again we're talking,
Speaker 1: we're talking numbers like this. It just gets impossible to
Speaker 1: really put that in anything approaching a human frame of reference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't really like picture or imagine it. You just
Speaker 1: have to say, well, I mean, I guess boy. Human
Speaker 1: bodies don't go there, and if if they did, they
Speaker 1: would just you'd just be I don't even know what
Speaker 1: the word is. I'm trying to saying crushed would be
Speaker 1: one thing, but it would be more than being crushed,
Speaker 1: because that's normally like uh, you know, being pressed down
Speaker 1: into a small space. I would think more than just obliterate, obliterate, annihilated,
Speaker 1: it would be It reminds me a little bit of
Speaker 1: the In the past, we've talked about different health theologies
Speaker 1: about what if if there's a hell in your uh,
Speaker 1: your your your religious worldview, what happens when you go there?
Speaker 1: And in some of them it's you know, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's fire and somebody's sticking you with something. But in others,
Speaker 1: it's total annihilation, like your being, your soul, everything is
Speaker 1: just destroyed. And if you really were to go to
Speaker 1: the center of the earth after you died in a
Speaker 1: kind of like physical direct fashion, I think annihilation theology
Speaker 1: would hold pretty sound. Maybe, yeah, what's the that's a
Speaker 1: good point. Yeah, Or maybe you'd only I guess your
Speaker 1: best hope to send only far enough. You would just
Speaker 1: be crushed into a diamond. Has anyone ever been crushed
Speaker 1: into a diamond in like a comic? I think Superman
Speaker 1: could make diamonds. I believe there is a service. I
Speaker 1: don't remember if this is real or not, but I
Speaker 1: think there's a service that at least claims that they
Speaker 1: will turn your dead your dead body into a diamond.
Speaker 1: Take your ashes, and take the carbon content of your
Speaker 1: body and squeeze it down and to a synthetic diamond. Ah. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that does ring a bell. But it's not like Fantos
Speaker 1: Thanos doing it with his his his gauntlet or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I gotta admit I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about Thanos. What does Thanos do? He's got the big
Speaker 1: the gauntlet with Okay, I haven't seen those movies, so
Speaker 1: I don't know about than I'm sorry. Well, he is
Speaker 1: from another world, so let's talk about other worlds. A
Speaker 1: planetary examples of extreme pressure. Well, yeah, that's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting because I was thinking about how when you imagine
Speaker 1: crushing environments and other planets. I think most of us,
Speaker 1: if you just think about it real fast, you probably
Speaker 1: think first of gravity. Right. We imagine there's some planets
Speaker 1: out there in our Solar System so huge and massive
Speaker 1: that their gravity would make it impossible for us to
Speaker 1: walk around on their surface, would be crushed under the
Speaker 1: weight of our own bodies. Yeah. I always go back
Speaker 1: to phantasm. Yeah, and I think of the how they
Speaker 1: right phantasm, Yes, how they were crunching down the corpses
Speaker 1: into these like Java like dwarves, presumably to serve as
Speaker 1: like slave labor on this massive world somewhere. This is
Speaker 1: the rich imagination of Don Costcareliott a Jawa universe. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so within our Solar System at least, it's not really
Speaker 1: the gravity. I think you'd have to worry about the
Speaker 1: most in terms of being crushed on other planets that
Speaker 1: we can. So we can estimate some of the effects
Speaker 1: of high gravity planets simply by looking at the effects
Speaker 1: of acceleration on test pilots. Uh. The the effects of
Speaker 1: gravity and acceleration are physically actually the same, and this
Speaker 1: is why we measure the force of acceleration on the
Speaker 1: human body in terms of G s. One G is
Speaker 1: one Earth gravity at the surface. Yeah, if you think
Speaker 1: back to our episodes on artificial gravity and the ideas
Speaker 1: about how to generate artificial gravity and space, we get
Speaker 1: into this affair amount. Yeah, you use acceleration angular momentum.
Speaker 1: U use acceleration in space to simulate G forces and
Speaker 1: of course heightened G forces. So gravity and acceleration alike
Speaker 1: or negative G forces, these can harm or kill humans.
Speaker 1: That's certainly true. Primarily, I think, uh, the first thing
Speaker 1: that would kill you would be their effects on blood flow,
Speaker 1: like by pushing blood from one part of the body
Speaker 1: to the other, preventing circulation and say preventing oxygen from
Speaker 1: reaching the brain, or preventing blood from getting out of
Speaker 1: the brain. But unless I'm mistaken, I think there are
Speaker 1: no planets you could stand on in our Solar system
Speaker 1: with enough G forces to kill you, at least not
Speaker 1: immediately though. I mean there'll be lots of other things
Speaker 1: to kill you radiation and lack of breathable oxygen and
Speaker 1: all that, But the G the G forces alone, I
Speaker 1: don't think would crush you anywhere in our Solar system. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was looking around about this a little bit and it.
Speaker 1: For instance, um, the estimated cloud top gravity of Jupiter
Speaker 1: would be something like two point five to eight g's,
Speaker 1: so they're not a drastic increase. That's something test pilots
Speaker 1: can they do when they survive. Yeah. Now the surface
Speaker 1: of the Sun, however, that would be a gravity The
Speaker 1: figure I've found for that was twin seven s. Okay,
Speaker 1: So if we're gonna go walk in on the Sun,
Speaker 1: that would be a problem, a problem, But there are
Speaker 1: places you can go on our solar system, or atmosphere
Speaker 1: pressure would pretty much instantly annihilate you. I think Venus
Speaker 1: is a great example. Venus is really similar to Earth
Speaker 1: in mass and size. It's gravity is just a little
Speaker 1: over likee of Earth's, probably due to runaway greenhouse effect. Though,
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of Venus is super dense, composed mostly of
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, which traps heat, making Venus beyond boiling hot
Speaker 1: as well. Now, remember, on Earth, the atmosphere presses on
Speaker 1: us with about fourteen point five pounds per square inch.
Speaker 1: The pressure on Venus is about ninety two times that,
Speaker 1: or roughly equivalent to the pressure at more than nine
Speaker 1: meters or three thousand feet below the surface of the
Speaker 1: ocean absolutely crushing just to stand on the ground under
Speaker 1: the atmosphere in Venus, and I've seen it described that
Speaker 1: just the air, it would be kind of like being
Speaker 1: in a liquid. I mean, it would provide resistance when
Speaker 1: you tried to move because of how dnse the carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide atmosphere is. I mean, I think about the probes
Speaker 1: that we've actually landed on Venus in the past, you know,
Speaker 1: the Soviet manera landers and stuff. They were they had
Speaker 1: short lives. They got down to the surface and did
Speaker 1: manage to send back a few kind of grainy images,
Speaker 1: but they do not live long. Like once you're on
Speaker 1: the surface of Venus, it's hot enough to melt lead.
Speaker 1: As commonly said, it's like ninety two times surface atmospheric
Speaker 1: pressure on Earth. It's it's not friendly. Of course, the
Speaker 1: exact opposite is true of Mars, which has an atmosphere
Speaker 1: somewhere around a hundred times thinner than Earth's atmosphere, which
Speaker 1: means it weighs very little and pressure is very low.
Speaker 1: You don't want to go on the surface of Mars
Speaker 1: without your pressure I spacesuit on otherwise you might I
Speaker 1: don't think your guts would get inverted you would, you
Speaker 1: would have serious pressure based problems, low pressure based problems
Speaker 1: in addition to not being able to breathe and all that. Strangely,
Speaker 1: while freezing and lacking oxygen, Saturn's moon tighten, I think,
Speaker 1: compared to these other options, would have a relatively cozy
Speaker 1: atmosphere pressure of only about sixty percent greater than Earth's.
Speaker 1: According to NASA, it's roughly equivalent to swimming in about
Speaker 1: fifteen meters underwater. I mean, that's not the most comfy,
Speaker 1: but that's you know, better than venus, better than ye
Speaker 1: And interesting difference with the atmosphere of Titan is that
Speaker 1: because the gravity of Titan is much weaker than Earth,
Speaker 1: so I think it's only like fourteen percent of Earth's gravity,
Speaker 1: the atmosphere is held much more loosely and extends much
Speaker 1: higher into space. The sky literally goes higher on Titan.
Speaker 1: Now Earth's atmosphere, as we've discussed earlier, it's hard to
Speaker 1: say exactly where it cuts off. It just gets thinner
Speaker 1: and thinner as it goes higher and higher, much like
Speaker 1: Titans would also. So there is no clear dividing line,
Speaker 1: but a hundred kilometers is often cited as the beginning
Speaker 1: of space. That's just sort of an arbitrary marker that
Speaker 1: we use. I'd love to see what the sky looks
Speaker 1: like from the surface of Titan during a sunrise, during
Speaker 1: a sunset. I kind of want to go there with
Speaker 1: an atmosphere that is, you know, very roughly six times
Speaker 1: thicker than though I've a given different estimates I've seen.
Speaker 1: It also is said to be like ten times. Thinker,
Speaker 1: it's just six to ten time. I mean, just goes
Speaker 1: up and up and up. It would seem like it
Speaker 1: never stopped. But one last question, I was wondering about
Speaker 1: going back to our thing about about the possibilities of
Speaker 1: pressure having an effect on mountaintop religious beliefs. If different
Speaker 1: atmospheric environments and the differences in pressure do actually have
Speaker 1: anything to do with religious beliefs about mountains, Could the
Speaker 1: differing pressure of other planets do the same, Like what
Speaker 1: a low pressure or high pressure moon or planetary outpust
Speaker 1: become Olympus or Kailassa or some other kind of holy
Speaker 1: mountain in space. I think we should come back to
Speaker 1: doing the Sacred Mountain episode. I'm I'm stuck on that now. Well,
Speaker 1: there's yeah, there is a lot to discuss because I
Speaker 1: mean there's so many different of course myths and religious
Speaker 1: models that there's specifically interesting. I know, in the past
Speaker 1: we looked into the possibility of doing an episode about
Speaker 1: monsters of the mountains. Yeah, and uh, you know, we
Speaker 1: did a little looking around in that in that area.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm always happy to return to the mountains.
Speaker 1: We haven't given the mountains enough attention. Really. We can
Speaker 1: climb every mountain on the moon. There you go and
Speaker 1: find the dish that ran away with the spoon, all right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Pressure, uh, you know, just
Speaker 1: hopefully just a nice exploration of atmospheric pressure. Um, push
Speaker 1: us down on me, push us down on you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: under pressure. Just a nice overview of pressure to be
Speaker 1: found on Earth, in Earth and on other planets. As always,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from you your thoughts on this episode. Um. Uh.
Speaker 1: Certainly other like cool scientific uses of pressure pressure differentials
Speaker 1: out there that would be fun to discuss. Uh. We
Speaker 1: we love hearing from folks about all of that. And hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about our show, heading
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