The World's Deadliest Water

arya could you take us to the midwest please any place specifically um how about around 20 miles just south of chicago you mean the home of the chicago oh you betcha accents are fun but today's video topic isn't all that fun because in the water that you can see behind me just outside of romeoville illinois is the only stretch of water in the united states that if you were to fall into it and have an accident the coast guard will not attempt to rescue you and the reason why is completely invisible now entering the facility we begin today's tale with a fish what does this fish look like to you well to me it looks extremely derpy but if you're one of the millions of people who live and work in and around the american midwest and more specifically the great lakes this fish looks like economic disaster this is the asian carp a general name for a cluster of different invasive species that were first imported to the united states as a way to clean out fishery ponds but then for whatever reason they escaped into the mississippi river basin because these asian carp didn't evolve with other native fish like many invasive species they can out-compete the local species for food they reproduce too quickly and they have no real natural predators which has led to a population explosion it is estimated that if these asian carp made their way into the great lakes where fish are relied on native fish for food and business they could cause economic damages in the billions and it's not just money on the end of the fishing line here asian carp can be dangerous just not in the way that you think asian carp have an interesting way of escaping predators when they sense a disturbance in the water around them instead of just using their tails to swim away or hide or do whatever it is that fish do they use their powerful muscles to vault themselves up above the water surface many meters now that's fine in isolation but do you know what else disturbs water and sits a few meters above the water surface people in boats now watch this clip a guy is going down the river his boat and the disturbance from the engine and the wake makes the carp jump and then he gets slapped in the face by an asian carp it's inarguably very funny but this guy was actually pretty lucky and math explains why who let the carp out it takes some amount of work to move something around in physics speak it takes some force applied over some distance to change the kinetic energy of an object so now imagine that you are boating down some very beautiful section of illinois waterway at around 20 miles per hour your boat disturbs the horde of asian carp beneath one jumps up a few meters into the path of your pretty face keep in mind that these carp can weigh over a hundred pounds when you get slapped in the face by this fish your head deflects maybe let's say six inches if you solve for force here you find that the worst encounter you can have with one of these fish is the equivalent of a major league baseball bat swing to the face thousands of pounds force the videos that we see online of this interaction are funny but the injuries are not the u.s geological survey has cataloged damage to boats broken arms legs ribs noses there are fish that have even jumped into boats after being disturbed and slammed down the throttle putting everyone on the boat in immediate danger make no mistake my friends we now face a derpy scaly menace how do we fight it there are of course a number of weapons we could start deploying against our fishy foes some rather obvious we could start overfishing them and eating them in mass i hear they're quite tasty but my intuition says that the demand will not meet with their reproduction we could also just start going around in lakes and waterways and blowing them up or shooting them with bows and arrows and guns or we could apply the traditional a stabby stabby but i don't think that's either safe nor practical we tried dumping thousands of liters of poison into chicago canals but last time we did that it only killed a single carp just one it's unlikely we're gonna get a handle on this problem with active countermeasures and so the most recent approach that has gotten the most attention is a passive one a barrier to the great lakes to protect it from potential economic ruin and it also creates the water that no one will save you from now when you think of an invasive species you probably picture something undesirable like a stink bug or a weed that spreads everywhere but then you really think about it and you go whoops i actually have an invasive species that i feed and i love more than any person i've ever met my entire life that's right that oh hey sweetie that's right the domestic cat is listed as one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world don't let their cute little faces fool you they are tiny murder machines every year in the united states there are 160 million feral cats roaming around killing 4 billion birds and 22 billion small animals domestic cats are responsible for modern extinctions of reptiles birds and small mammals of a third of them they're responsible for one third of these extinctions that little face it'll get you but don't be mistaken that's the last thing billions of small animals see our story now brings us back to chicago you mean the home of the chicago bears you got that right sister if you stand right on romeo road and you look down on the chicago sanitary and shipping canal you'll see about 450 meters of water that aren't all that interesting but below the surface is a system of electrodes pumping out two volts per inch throughout the water volume this is the electric dispersal barrier system it's meant to turn carp away with many shocks per second that aren't going to instantly kill the fish but they will be uncomfortable enough to deter them from swimming up and into the great lakes yes this is an electrified river which makes it extremely dangerous perhaps even more dangerous than the drowning machine pure water is not very conductive that is electric current moving electrons does not move through it very well but water in a river and water in a human body is not pure it has a lot of stuff dissolved in it stuff like sodium and chlorine ions which i already added to the water in front of me in terms of table salt the loose ions and their charges in effect make the solution more able to transmit current by making it more electrically conductive now that's hard to really see so i'm going to show you up close by putting a 9-volt battery inside of this water don't worry nothing will happen bad to me probably okay now look here look right there see now thanks to a chemical reaction happening at the electrodes specifically the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen gas which you're seeing in the bubbles right there we can see with our very own eyes that current from the battery is moving out into the water here is only a tiny tiny current so it's so small that no danger actually comes to me from putting my finger in the water but with the electric dispersal barrier we are certainly not talking about nine volt batteries oh i felt tingly as you likely know we are a body electric we rely on tiny electrical currents the result of chemical reactions to do everything from move our muscles around to think thoughts oh no where's my son where's my boy [Applause] it makes sense to think then that too much electrical current running throughout your body can have some deleterious effects on it especially in water or the difference in resistivity between water and human fleshy flesh is effectively zero the electrodes resting at the bottom of the chicago sanitary and shipping canal are pulsing about seven times per second with dc or direct current around 100 milliamps of it well kyle you may ask how many milliamps does it take to start seriously affecting the human body 10. this fact is why many studies on the potential danger of falling into this water produce figures like this where red areas indicate the areas that if you were in that water you have a more than 50 percent chance of experiencing some effect like cardiac arrest yeah it's all red now everything no but seriously can someone like carpe the carp please thank you everything we've gone through up until now is why according to official documents i obtained from the united states coast guard quote the electric dispersal barrier is the only location where the coast guard will not attempt to rescue individuals who fall overboard end quote why well the same documents put the mortality rate for individuals who fall into this water even highly specialized individuals with training at 50 percent which is insane for an engineering risk it's so high thankfully no one has come even close to being hurt at the edbs yet and no carp have been found beyond it when i started researching this video just to make sure i reached out to both the army and the coast guard and at the time of publishing this video i have not been corrected on this recommendation which makes this stretch of water i think the most artificially dangerous water in the world and i'm also on a watch list now probably as we've been going through a number of times on this channel recently pay attention to scary warning signs because if you were to fall in here you're on your own until next time now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this video today especially i want to recognize research assistant bitface at the facility and visiting scholar crystal small if you want to join the facility get on the staff get on the patreon and the discord where you can talk with me almost every day you can give me episode ideas we have dnd nights magic the gathering leagues we have radio stations we share pictures of our pets and stuff and their little floofy beans you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and get on the staff today and if you support the facility just enough you get your name on aria here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the electric eels are interesting to me because evolution kind of knew the difference in electrical conductivity between air and water and it doesn't know of course it just happened to work and i think that is in line with the physics and that's really interesting to me there are no animals that have something like an electric eel ability in air they all live in the water whether that's electric eel that's not an eel and the electric catfish and some other animals evolution hit upon this conductivity property where it could be a viable strategy in water but never in air and that kind of shows why electric current in the water so much more dangerous or also wouldn't exist in electric eels that's i'm not rambling you're still going cool thanks for watching don't worry i'm probably fine with this you

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 1,433,947

Rating: 4.8989067 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, army, coast guard, chicago, asian carp, invasive species, great lakes, edbs, Electric Dispersal Barrier System, most dangerous waters, dangerous places, most dangerous

Id: _aVqPHjvZ54

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020