Corpse recovery is not happening here. But if we could find the remains of 5 people who suddenly compressed at the bottom of the ocean what would they look like?
A tiny crack would send water pressure so fast it would cut iron bar, but I’m guessing compression all happened at once in a crunch. So the bodies would look like they were in a massive car/train accident? Or would they be bobbing around looking like wet Romero Zombies because human bodies are also made of water and hard stuff.
Probably not even that solid.
Over in the main thread, the most agreed-upon answer was “basically a bit of goo, probably unrecognizable as individuals,” but some thought that a few bone fragments or the like might have moved outward in the split second before everything moved inward.
I read that the implosion force was akin to having 400 house-sized blocks of concrete all dropped on you at once. Instant death, liquidated/smashed.
Never has the phrase “water hammer” sounded so sinister and yet completely appropriate.
Yeah. The meat would be paste. The bones would be dust.
And of course since the whole greasy mess is sitting in a (very large) slowly moving tub of water you’d expect it to slowly spread out in a fog of particles drifting away at whatever the speed of the current is. Probably a small fraction of a mile an hour, but even 0.1 mph is 2+ miles per day. The oilier parts would be lighter than water and slowly rise, while the minerally parts would be heavier and settle onto / into the existing bottom ooze. Some stuff would be sticky enough to stick together in lumps for awhile. But just like soaking a used mixing bowl of tuna salad in the sink, eventually everything is just tidbits floating around in the water.
And that’s before any local animals decide to ingest the nutrients.
In the Norwegian drill rig diving bell incident, one of the divers was . . . extruded shall we say in a split second through a 1/4” wide opening and pieces found roughly thirty feet away. This was a 9 atmospheres difference, above water. Nothing like the pressures involved in thousands of feet of seawater though. Complete implosion in milliseconds, there won’t be anything but dissolved solids.
Scott Manley did a livestream last night about it.
Two points he made that stuck with me:
The energy involved would have been approximately equivalent to 50 kilograms of TNT.
The energies involved would mean that the bodies would stop being biology and start being physics. (Pretty sure he cribbed that from Culture novels).
And remember it’s more than just the pressure. I mean, that’s the main thing but the people are inside a submarine. That pressure hull and other bits become a big Ginsu slicing things apart in a fraction of a second. (Perhaps the only fortunate thing here is it was instantaneous).
I have read some articles that claim that because of Gay-Lussac’s law, that an implosion would cause some sort of instant incineration due to the extreme pressure rise, and consequent increase in temperature. Kind of like being in a diesel engine cylinder, where the fuel combusts like that.
It doesn’t wash to me; I suspect that the time frames are too short for any effective heat transfer to take place for incineration, but I don’t know if this is true or not.
Anyone got any actual idea if this is true?
Ginsus don’t work on liquids.
I’m not sure exactly how it plays out in this case but when things get compressed (like air) it heats up. Not sure how hot things got here for a fraction of a second but willing to bet super-duper hot would fit.
They were cooked mush.
EDIT: I missed @bump 's post on this. Sorry.
Temperature is a function of pressure, and doesn’t need any time for heat transfer to take place. Once again, it’s like 50kg of TNT went off inside of that little space.
But it would be more vaporization than incineration, as it would be more physics than chemistry at those energies, and there wouldn’t have been enough oxygen to burn more than a fraction of the organic material.
More likely xkcd:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/
Huh, I wonder if he thought that was where he was getting the phrase from then. I got the impression that that was what he was implying.
Anyway, it’s a good phrase, but a terrible fate.
The good news, such that it is, is that it would have all happened in a tiny fraction of a second, short enough that there wasn’t even enough time for any nerve signals to make it from the outside of their bodies to their brains before it was all squished.
Agreed. A brief dose of very hot air, followed immediately by a flood of very cold water would seem to preclude anything that could be called incineration. Maybe some singed hair.
True… although if there were warning signs (e.g. an alarm that something is wrong) then there might be time to be scared considering where they were. But yeah, if it imploded they felt nothing. Effectively instantaneous to them. A better fate than facing suffocation a few days in the future.
I suppose it’s better for everyone that they turned instantly into a wet version of fish food flakes.
5 more crosses down there, graves for a specific combination of wealthy and stupid. Starting to have a Everest thing going.
For what it’s worth I have a friend who works at NASA who got bored at work the other day and did some Excel-style back-of-the-envelope calculations:
