![]() ![]() A second way to think about it is that 1,100 ATM is about the same as the peak pressure that occurs in the chamber of a handgun for a fraction of a second after the bullet fires. Now imagine another Eiffel Tower for every square inch of your body. One analogy the Deep Sea Challenge team uses (and I quoted yesterday) is that 1,100 ATM is equivalent to inverting the Eiffel Tower and resting its point on your big toe. Well, in Cameron’s own words, it’s so great that the steel sphere in which he travels to the bottom actually shrinks measurably during descent. What does that mean though? 1,100 ATM is just an abstract number. Cameron and the outside of that 40-inch sphere he’s jammed into. That’s a different of 1,099 ATM between Mr. At the bottom of the Marianas Trench, however, the weight of seven miles of water overhead means that the ambient pressure is about 1,100 atmospheres. When Deep Challenger descended to the earth’s deepest point, however, it passed that difference at just 10 meters (30ft) below the surface! Indeed, you can experience and survive this difference quite easily for short periods, so that scene in Total Recall where Arnie and Rachel Ticotin’s eyes are bugging out of their heads on the Martian surface? Yeah, not so much. That’s a pressure difference of 1 atmosphere. You see, inside a space capsule the pressure is 1 atmosphere, the same as on land at mean sea level on earth, while the pressure outside the capsule is close to zero: the vacuum of space. Getting there is the hardest part, and once you’re there, cosmic rays, weightlessness and those nasty bitey little micrometeoroids can play havoc with even the most well-prepared astronaut and his/her spacecraft.īut there is one property where my throwaway holds true and that is pressure. I have one skeptical friend who objected to my statement that, relative to the Marianas Trench “space is easy”. ![]() It just looks so plain, serene and (in Cameron’s words) desolate. ![]() In trying to explain to friends, colleagues and Twitter followers during recent days what James Cameron may have seen out that softball-sized window of the Deep Challenger submersible last Sunday, I’ve struggled to convey effectively just how hostile the deep sea environment can really be. Edit – In the original article I said that the sphere of the Deep Challenger was made of titanium. ![]()
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