What Happened to the People on the Titanic?

april 10th 1912 the titanic a british passenger liner carrying 2435 passengers departs from southampton england and begins its journey across the atlantic its final destination is new york city the ship of course would never reach the big apple because on april 14th at 11 40 p.m it hit an iceberg about 400 miles off the coast of newfoundland and sank on april 15th at 2 20 am but everyone knows this what most people don't know is what happened to the passengers on the ship when it sank what happened to the passengers as the ship traveled from the surface of the ocean down 2.4 miles to its watery grave was it possible for passengers to stay alive while the ship sank to the ocean floor or would most have expired within the first few seconds well luckily physics and physiology can help unravel what happened during that 10 minute descent and oh my it's not pretty ok let's start at the service level just before the ship is fully submerged there's 20 lifeboats in the water holding 708 passengers and on the ship there's about 1500 still alive most people are distributed at the stern and some are alive and trapped in the middle part of the ship in the dining halls in the many long hallways or in their own cabins they can't reach the stern due to the ship's steep 30 degree angle suddenly the 16 000 ton stern tears from the bow and the ship sinks into the ocean within 15 seconds let's first start at 100 feet under water here the water pressure is 45 pounds per square inch or three atmospheres on dry land the atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch or one atmosphere which is about equivalent of a bowling ball being exerted on every square inch of your body fun fact the more you decrease in altitude that is go below sea level on dry land the atmospheric pressure increases every 33 feet you descend the atmosphere increases by 22.6 grams or 0.05 pounds per square inch so you can go pretty deep below sea level underwater though it's much different because water is 800 times heavier than air every 33 feet you descend the atmospheric pressure increases by 14.7 pounds per square inch this explains why the pressure at 100 feet is already 3 atmospheres heavy and boy do we have a long way to go the ship is at 100 feet underwater with a pressure of 3 atmospheres which sounds like a lot but it's really not 100 feet is pretty normal for most professional free divers and some even go beyond 300 feet however this depth is still notable as it's where physiological effects become really apparent the pressure begins to compress gases in your body one significant place where this happens is your lungs which begin to shrink for visualization this empty soda bottle full of air is submerged 75 feet under water the bottle is shrinking because the gases in it are being compressed at 75 feet the atmospheric pressure is about 33.4 pounds per square inch or 2.2 atmospheres upon resurfacing the gases re-expand now the ship is at 300 feet at this depth there is nine atmospheres of pressure or 133 pounds per square inch surprisingly at this depth and pressure the human physiology can still function but barely professional free diver and williams give a detailed description to the new york post of what it was like to dive down to 330 feet without any scuba gear i was surrounded by pitch black darkness and my throat felt like it was being choked you're crushed by the water pressure your chest shrinks to half its size and your trachea begins to collapse so at 300 feet passengers could have still been alive and possibly conscious however they would have been in extreme discomfort and near to blacking out by 500 feet fatal effects begin happening to the body at this step the average person cannot free dive and would need scuba gear to stay alive pressure is at 15 atmospheres or 222 pounds per square inch without the use of scuba gear breathing would not be possible as the lungs are too compressed normally alveoli exchange oxygen into the blood but because the lungs are compressed soar the alveoli thereby reducing surface area and making gas exchange impossible in fact the pressure is so high that nitrogen gas in your blood dissolves into nerve cell membranes obviously this isn't supposed to happen in human physiology and as a result nerve signaling becomes disrupted causing tremors dizziness hallucinations and high probability of blacking out this is what any living passengers would have felt in addition to a compressed chest and throat the titanic sank a distance of 2.4 miles so why are we focusing on the first 100 300 and 500 feet of the descent well because the first 500 feet is the zone where passengers could have theoretically still been alive given how fast the ship descended however after 500 feet passengers would not be alive no matter where they were in the ship if there were any air pockets in the ship they would have been imploded by now and holding your breath at 500 feet is physiologically impossible for the average person as the ship passed 500 feet passengers would have blacked out and then succumbed to the increasing pressure on the lungs and throat not to mention the physiological effects of gases dissolving into the nervous system since the titanic took about 10 minutes to hit the ocean floor the first 500 feet would have taken about 15 to 20 seconds to reach so any passengers still alive when it sank would have lasted about 20 seconds and 30 seconds at absolute best yet we still have 12 028 feet left to go so do you want to know what happened to the passengers when they reached the bottom of 6 000 pounds of pressure let's find out there are records of people free diving down to 500 feet and deeper austrian freediver herbert nitch holds the world record for the deepest free dive of 702 feet the only other record of someone going deeper is egyptian diver ahmed gabir who dived down to 1089 feet or one-fifth of a mile with scuba gear at this depth the pressure is 33 atmospheres or 485 pounds per square inch beyond this depth even with scuba gear we don't have any records of what happens to a human body especially at 2.4 miles deep yet by applying the effects of physics to human physiology we can get a fairly good understanding of what happens somewhere between 1089 feet and 12 528 the bodies would have succumbed to the extreme pressures of the ocean we can't say for sure at which depth these effects would have happened one mile 1.5 miles 2 miles we're just not sure however we can say what would have happened at the end of the 2.4 mile descent passengers trapped in the many compartments of the ship which by now would be full of water would have been exposed to the complete effects of pressure at 2.4 miles or 380 atmospheres or 5584 pounds per square inch more simply as ralph white put it who was one of the members who helped discover titanic in 1985 said the pressure is like placing a human between two steel plates and driving a train over them at that pressure all gaseous volumes would have been imploded and crushed to pieces this is what happened to the stern when it sank when the titanic broke in too the open end of the stern sunk downward causing air to get trapped inside as the stern descended gases were increasingly compressed until the stern imploded from the pressure this explains why it's so badly damaged compared to the bow this same scenario happened to the passengers the body has multiple gaseous cavities in it such gaseous locations include the lungs gi tract and sinus cavities in the head when the passengers would have gotten to this depth all the gaseous volumes would have been crushed flat and into pieces that means a crushed abdominal cavity chest cavity and sinus cavities in the face at this point you may be asking why the near six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure wouldn't crush the bodies into a fine paste well unlike gases solids and liquids can't be compressed the human body is mostly water and bones are solid so neither can be crushed because water applies pressure equally over a surface this is why artifacts have been taken from the site untouched ceramic plates remain unbroken because they're solid and can't be compressed this is why only the gaseous volumes in the body were crushed because again gases can be compressed as for the passengers remains nature takes its course and we can say with very high accuracy as to what would have happened two canadian criminologists from simon fraser university wanted to see what exactly happened when the land animal decayed at the bottom of the ocean two pig carcasses were placed one thousand feet at the bottom of the sales sea it was discovered that after three days both pig carcasses were devoured down to the bone the creature that was able to pull this off was an amphipod and it wasn't just one but hundreds of thousands of them from here immense pressure and water dissolving the remains would have made the bones disappear within about five years so there you have it any burning questions and what happened to the passengers of the titanic made clear when the ship began its descent underwater any living passengers would have lasted only 20-30 seconds at best due to the increasing pressure at the bottom of the ocean passengers gaseous cavities in the face chest and abdomen would have been crushed finally amphipods would have consumed the passengers down to the bone within three to four days and bone would have fully dissolved in the water after about five years all right so for the update um now i've had questions for science as a full-time channel now for about three or four years um and i enjoy science very much but before i was actually a scientist before i majored in science i actually majored in history and then i changed majors back in college but i wanted to be a history teacher but life happens so i decided to make a new channel which is now called questions for history so i can kind of be a history teacher on youtube as well as a science teacher um so right now there's no content but by the time this video is uploaded i will have content on this channel in fact the first video is going to be on why we don't build castles anymore both for the civilian and military reasons it should be very interesting i think you'll like it but yeah so new channel questions for history if you like history check it out if you like science check it out they're both here but that's that's the update thanks for watching and stay tuned you

Channel: Dark Science

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Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020