Crushed, Burned or Toothpaste? Surgeon Explains What Happened To Crew OceanGate TITAN Sub Implosion (230 views, 5 replies)
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The best scientific attempt so far to explain the fate of the Titan passengers. Very interesting and very informative. 
master
guru
Water pressure on the human body is something I have never really understood. Freedivers can dive down a couple of hundred feet and come back up with no damage. But if you put someone in an old-fashioned diving suit with a big brass and glass helmet and go to that depth, and the pump breaks and the anti-reverse valve doesn't work, when they pull the suit up there are usually some broken-up bones in the helmet and the body is a paste in the first 30 or 40 feet of the air hose. This happened so many times in the early days there is even a fancy name for it that I forget.
@Wander The air pressure is around 1 Bar (14.6 psi) at sea level.
If you dive under water the pressure increases 1 Bar every 10m (a sum that is easy to remember) due to the weight of water on top of you.
Free-divers can go quite deep on one breath of air and their cavities (lungs etc) are squeezed smaller by the pressure and re-expand on the way up because their bodies are flexible enough, but there are limits.
Scuba divers have air regulators for breathing tank air at the same pressure as their surroundings, and their bodies are not squeezed because they have the same pressure inside and out. Again there are depth limits.
But the old suit divers had a brass helmet and canvas suit filled with compressed air from a pump and hose in the boat. If the pump stopped and the pressure fell the suddenly you have water pressure acting on the poor guy's body and the helmet was vented to atmosphere.. he is squeezed through the helmet and up the hose. Nasty, very nasty.
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@Buttless I will check that out, thanks. I first heard of these effects in a series of fiction books called The Ring of Fire Books by Eric Flint It is an alternate-history series where a small coal town in modern-day West Virginia is transported to the middle of Germany in the year 1632. Once word gets around, everyone wants the new "up-time" tech. The King of Denmark gets ahold of a diving helmet and suit and metal boots but not the rest of the equipment. They have to figure out how to make the air pump and hose and etc and they had everything right except they did not know they needed a valve to keep the air in the suit in case the pump or hose broke so they would have a chance to pull him up alive. They sent down a volunteer, the pump failed and it was as if a giant had squeezed a toothpaste tube. The Danes never tried to use it as a diving suit again, but the King did keep it around to execute political prisoners.
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