What If You Throw a Steel Ball into the Mariana Trench

there are many cool places on our planet where you can conduct strange experiments for example you could fry pancakes in the Sahara play a game of basketball on Mount Everest fly a kite in Antarctica or drop a steel ball into the Mariana Trench they say that this task is given to some students but this seemed really interesting to me and I decided to conduct my own scientific research theoretically speaking of course it's not easy to get to the Mariana Trench and littering it with steel balls is not such a good idea I wouldn't recommend doing this so in order to solve this unusual problem it's necessary to clarify some conditions for starters we'll deal with the trench itself we study the situation the Mariana Trench is the deepest ocean trench on earth known to mankind anyway it's easy to find in satellite pictures without the help of Google this is the Pacific Ocean here are the Mariana Islands and a huge crescent moon in the water sea the Mariana Trench itself has a deepest point called challenger deep ten thousand nine hundred and ninety four meters or thirty six thousand and sixty nine feet below sea level plus or minus a little more this is just unreal depth for the first time the crew of the HMS challenger sailing ship discovered this place in 1875 and even tried to measure the depth it didn't work out very well technology of that time was incapable after 76 years another ship arrived here which was also called the Challenger with the help of an echo sounder and improvised means the team managed to determine the depth of the French then the Challenger Deep got its name and at the same time earning the status of the deepest place on the planet as anywhere the depth here greatly affects pressure in the Challenger abyss it's more than a thousand times higher than normal pressure at sea level here it's one hundred and eight point six mega Pascal's and where there is serious depth there's a change in the density of water everything is normal on the surface but then the water becomes five percent denser and it's quite cold there from one to four degrees Celsius that's about thirty four to thirty nine Fahrenheit for comparison the water temperature of the coast of the island of Guam ranges from 27 to 29 degrees Celsius that's 80 to 84 Fahrenheit this is a really warm region but the sun's rays simply can't get through the deep water in the Mariana Trench so this temperature variation occurs all of these factors of course affect the local inhabitants few are ready to live in darkness cold and under tremendous pressure but will temperature and pressure affect a steel ball when they to be honest aren't so strong as for temperature it doesn't play a role at all one to four degrees Celsius or 34 to 39 Fahrenheit is nothing especially for steel the role of pressure is much more interesting pressure can compress a substance so much that it's torn to pieces a pillar of water in the Mariana Trench will easily crush a person literally just one second is enough so no teleportation right to the bottom but that's only you not Wolverine from the x-men well you know the guy with a skeleton of adamantium the human body is too weak to resist such tremendous pressure but metal are completely different matter in order for steel to change its shape it'll take more pressure than 108 point 6 mega Pascal's about twice this much if you use very crude calculations to do this you'd have to place the balls somewhere deep into the earth because the pressure of the ocean is certainly not enough or send it somewhere outside of our planet however pressure in the mariana trench will still compress the steel ball and reduce its volume at thousandth of a percent you wouldn't even notice it visually yes and it's also unlikely that the inhabitants of the mariana trench understand such things imagine you're deep-sea fish and suddenly a steel ball floats past you it's unlikely that you would even try to figure out how pressure affects it most likely the ball won't interest you at all if it cannot be eaten by the way the changes won't be permanent if you lift the ball to the surface it will return to its shape since the pressure will drop to normal but again no one will notice this except for engineers who decide to take precise measurements in general it would be better to figure out the speed at first it seemed to me that the steel ball would sink very slowly and smoothly that it will be slowed down by the water but it turned out that everything isn't quite so a steel ball moving through water will quickly reach its terminal speed that is the speed at which the force of gravitational attraction is balanced by the resistance force of the medium well and other factors as well in general I did some calculations but I won't bore you with formulas the maximum speed of the ball would be 15 meters or 49 feet per second this is comparable the speed of a car driving in the city fast enough especially for marine life that gets caught in the balls way but let's assume that this won't happen no one will suffer and our ball will not slow anything down consequently the steel ball will reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench in about 12 minutes there it will crash into the bottom and most likely gets stuck in the silt maybe even creating something like a small funnel and this would be one of the biggest events in the Mariana Trench in recent years by the way what if we replace the steel ball with something more common say a tennis ball no you need something more impressive for example a bowling ball usually they consist of different types of plastic sometimes with the addition of rubber ceramics and even glass but usually without metal because of this bowling balls are pretty buoyant in any case they can stay on the surface for the ball to sink in water its weight must be more than five-and-a-half kilograms or more than twelve pounds such objects exist but I propose to go even further for example let's sink a seven kilogram or 15 pound bowling ball in the Mariana Trench how fast will it sink to the bottom given a speed of approximately 1.3 meters or 4.2 feet per second it'll finally reach the bottom after 2 hours and 20 minutes you can throw the ball into the water and watch a movie it'll be just in time for the final credits a 5 kilogram or a 13 pound ball will reach the bottom in four and a half hours but if it's made of iron then 30 minutes is enough a bowling ball made of lead will hit the bottom in 23 minutes and a ball of pure gold in just 17 minutes why not drop it into the ocean for the sake of science so now we have a bunch of bowling balls in the Mariana Trench but what will happen to that first steel ball once it's already at the bottom for example in a week or in a month or in a year well the ball will be able to lie in the mariana trench for a very long time in the deep rust simply doesn't form in the usual way but at the bottom can live bacteria that simply love metals and oxidize them such organisms for example have been destroying the Titanic for years it lies at a depth of about 3.8 kilometers or 2.3 miles which of course is just nonsense compared to the Mariana Trench but to bacteria in general no difference huge pressure won't affect you if you're very tiny it's possible that these bacteria will enjoy lunch with our steel ball in the end it will completely collapse and mix with water and silt at the bottom you can't say the same about a plastic bowling ball any synthetic material will have to be lifted from the bottom so as not to affect the environment so if you suddenly decide to repeat my experiment in reality don't forget to clean up after yourself if you liked the video give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already click on the bell to receive timely notifications of new interesting videos that are waiting for you ahead

Channel: Ridddle

Views: 3,807,040

Rating: 4.191895 out of 5

Keywords: Ridddle, riddle, what if, what, if, what would happened, What Happens If, sci, science, smart, experiment, Mariana Trench, Steel ball, Trench

Id: z1Xat-Bk8rc

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020