Shit if I know, man… all I’ve got is bordeaux.
Well, since no one has mentioned being in deep shit yet, I guess I’ll have to.
“The world’s largest whales are blue whales, and these excrete a minimum of 2 percent of their body weight — about three tons — each day.”. :eek:
According to some Company Commanders, the only thing lower than hammered whale shit are the recruits undergoing Coast Guard Basic Training. Especially the ones in HIS company.
But the Training Cadre for the ancient Greek, Persian, and Viking navies probably said the same thing about their seaman recruits.
I notice a lot of bubble in that Warhammer picture. I guess the point is that, Catastalsis or no, you’d have more trouble moving that stuff out of a fully-flattened colon.
I’ll add that I know for a fact that you can rip a pretty good fart at depth. Ejecting solid material wouldn’t present any difficulty.
No more trouble than if you were on the surface with a colon containing no gas.
Consider for a moment the fact that here on dry land, you’re already under ~14.7 psi of pressure, and have no trouble evacuating your bowels.
Wouldn’t it vary? I mean, even at atmospheric pressure, some shit sinks and some floats. Would floaters still float and sinkers still sink? Maybe everything would be more likely to sink, due to air spaces being compressed - refer to the diver in a bottle home experiment.
:eek: but also 
Floating/Sinking is a separate issue from the ease/difficulty of defecation. And you’re absolutely right, the compression of gas pockets due to depth does affect buoyancy. SCUBA divers wear a device called a buoyancy control device to deal with this. It’s basically a vest with air bladders that can be selectively filled/emptied by the diver. You can use it to establish neutral buoyancy at any given depth. If you then descend, all the pores in your neoprene wetsuit compress, and the bladders in the BCD compress, and you end up with negative buoyancy, so you put a little more air into the BCD to reestablish neutral buoyancy.
A chunk of poop doesn’t have that option. If the density of its solid/liquid portion is such that it is reliant on internal pockets of gas for buoyancy, then at some depth the gas pockets will compress to such a degree that it will no longer be positively buoyant. OTOH, if its composition is such that it’s very oily/fatty, then it may be positively buoyant even if there are no gas pockets at all.
To follow up on the bouyancy…
A typical poop probably has a fair amount of small gas pockets saturated throughout it. When pooped at depth, could we expect any of the following to happen:
Effervescing (like an Alka-seltzer)?
Explosive pop (like a little depth charge)?
If non-uniform saturation, could escaping gas cause it to pinwheel? Or rocket away?
When you gotta go, you gotta go.
Most scuba dives are within recreational limits - relatively shallow and short in duration with the ability to surface at any point during the dive. In such a short dive rarely is the urge to go so great that it cannot be anticipated and dealt with on the surface after the dive.
But a fewtechnical divers may be underwater for hours and incur an obligatory decompression stop - a stop in shallow water before surfacing. Divers using fully closed rebreather systems might be underwater for around 6 hours. The urge to go might be an issue in such a long dive.
If a rebreather diver is lucky enough to be diving in warm water, they might be able to drop such an underwater depth charge. In colder water they typically dive in dry suits where disrobing is not practical. Such drysuit divers may wear a diaper to deal with any such problems.
I love this thread. Also, I now have Iggy mentally tagged as Poop Expert.
I’m delighted at the thought of an effervescent, pinwheeling turd rocketing away from this world.
Well, since you didn’t, I will. You can call him Iggy Poop.
Sorry, Iggy.
Oh, my word, will they ever! I remember getting caught by Mother Nature (more than once, actually) at 40 feet plus and letting fly in the world’s biggest toilet. It was just amazing how quickly the little fishies would show up for lunch. Almost scary.