rurban 14 minutes ago

Furniture moving to one side on the top deck sounds most plausible to me.

rwmj an hour ago

If I remember it right, Mythbusters did the "sinking boat will pull you under" and found it was a myth?

  • jazzyjackson 30 minutes ago

    they busted it with a 9 ton boat but now I’m unconvinced because they did demonstrate the effect with a large weight dropping straight down in a pool, so what effect was that?! They were testing Titanic myths and didn’t touch on the fact that Titanic famously dropped like a stone!

    https://youtu.be/rvU_dkKdZ0U

MichaelZuo 3 hours ago

How could 3 adults, even lying perfectly still, not use up all the oxygen in that air pocket within 35 hours?

I thought human beings needed several cubic meters of fresh oxygen (at 1 atm) per hour…

  • jazzyjackson 38 minutes ago

    You got me wondering and I thought maybe there was some kind of gas diffusion where carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean water instead of building up in the enclosed space, and finding the most closely related stack exchange question I think I’m satisfied with this answer:

    probably that four-foot bubble communicated with a larger volume or air under the hull of the boat - and that's the most reasonable explanation of this miraculous survival.

    When picturing it we might assume the rest of the boat is flooded and this pocket of air is all that remained but that may not be the case.

    https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/67970/surviving-...

    • gunian 19 minutes ago

      Mr Nimbus gave them gills to save them and wiped their memory :)

  • _hyn3 3 hours ago

    Not at 1atm. The air was pressurized.

    • russell_h an hour ago

      It doesn’t sound to me like the boat actually sank. In the article it mentioned that they heard the rescue helicopter from within. Wouldn’t that imply that the pressure inside would be one atmosphere? Am I thinking about the physics of this wrong?

      • duskwuff 25 minutes ago

        Sound does carry remarkably well through water - but you're right. The ship capsized, but the hull held enough air that it stayed afloat.

      • BurningFrog 24 minutes ago

        It was floating upside down.

        There is a picture towards the end of the story.

    • nwellinghoff an hour ago

      How is that? It was at surface pressure and then rolled over.

      • K0balt 9 minutes ago

        If the booyancy of the trapped air was a significant factor in the boat not sinking, then the air would have been at pressures over 1atm.

        Put a barometer in an empty, upside-down cup. Force the upside down cup 1/2 way down into the water, trapping the air inside.

        The barometer will be at the sea pressure of the bottom of the cup.