this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Do you think they died from the water rushing in and hitting them unconscious?
They died by being crushed with enough pressure such that the air inside the sub ignited ie compressed so much it essentially exploded. Death was instant.
Put another way: The matter that made up their bodies was very quickly rearranged into other chemicals; much quicker than the long chain-reactions that make up human thought.
I know a diesel engine works off compression, but it has a fuel. All fires must have oxygen, fuel, and heat. What fuel would they have in the titan to ignite?
Everything (including the passengers) inside the sub could have been fuel for combustion had there been time for the reaction to take place. If I remember correctly the interior of the sub could have temporarily been hotter than the surface of the sun during the implosion. Pretty sure just about everything burns at those temps. But the collapse and gas release from the hull happened so quickly I doubt there was time for anything to ignite.
If you compress a gas enough it will get hot enough to ignite. Google “fire pistons”.
It's also why airplane tires are filled with nitrogen instead of air. On landing, the high pressure and heat can cause the oxygen in air to combust.
Phew. Imagine being the pilot to find that out.
Ex-people, plastic and so on. With a small room's worth of air it wouldn't have burned long, though.
More significant is just how hot it would get as it collapses. When you suddenly compress an an ideal gas (which air is a lot like) it gets hotter in proportion to it's previous absolute temperature. Room temperature is already 273K, and the pressure down there is hundreds of time larger than at the surface. At some point the law would break down on the way, but you get the basic idea. It was probably as hot as the sun without any help from combustion
Water contains oxygen. With enough heat that oxygen becomes free.
"Rushing" implies something like a wave. The thing crushed flat like the plastic tube it was, and would have done so too fast to even visually track.
If you were to slowly lower an open glass into the ocean, it would gradually fill with water. So i just think its the same with the sub, albeit faster?
Sure, but "faster" here means around the speed of sound, and that's fundamentally a different thing from the playful streams we're used to. The thing was waaay down there when it went.
If there was a tiny little hole somewhere that wasn't getting larger, maybe it would slow down enough to just gradually fill the vessel. In that case, though, it would not have imploded. They found it in pieces and the US Navy heard the pop.
Yeah I guess if you think of the fact it actually went 'boom' you can imagine the water didnt really flow in but rather flew in very fast. There was probably a huge shockwave that killed them instantly