I was impressed with the hypotheses that I received about what happened to the Styrofoam cups…nicely done everyone! I know you all are interested to see what happened…drum roll please…
Perfect Cups?
Perfectly intact! But wait…
Shrunk!
Shrunk to miniature proportions!! Behind is the size of Styrofoam cup I started out with, for reference.
Tiny Cup
A teeny tiny cup for Mrs. Vigre.
As you can see, our cups survived the journey to 3500 meters, but arrived back at the surface much smaller than when they started out!
How does this happen, you ask? Well, imagine that as you travel down in the water, the amount of pressure increases. Take the amount of pressure you would feel on land- not much right?- and increase it with every 10meters (approximately 30ft) you travel down in the water. At 3500 meters the pressure you would feel would be 350 times that of what you would normally feel on land!! This is equal to over 5000psi (pounds per square inch) of pressure!! WOW.
Things that are able to be compressed, such as our Styrofoam cups, easily shrink under all that pressure, yet are able to maintain their original shape. The cups now feel different, because all that Styrofoam is packed down tight. Yet they look the same, but miniature! You can even still read all the writing that was put on them originally.
More questions arose after originally shrinking the cups…what is the minimum depth we can send the cups down that would shrink them? What is the minimum pressure required to shrink the cups? That’s the best part about science experiments…they always generate more questions than they answer!!!