Under Pressure

Imagine that you're at the bottom of a pool. Feel that pressure?

As a teenager, I had access to a pool that had an 8 foot deep end. You could dive in safely, then cruise to the bottom and hang out for a sec before swimming back up for air. I spent a lot of time cruising around the bottom of the pool, feeling that constant pressure from the water above.

One day, I got to swim at a pool with a deeper deep end, probably about 10 feet. The pressure was noticeably more intense down there. I could feel the pressure in my sinus cavity (basically inside of my face) being crushed, pushing back desperately against this intense inward pressure.

This type of pressure continues as you go down deeper, and I recently wrote about the way creatures survive in our oceans, where the atmospheric pressure can build up to a thousand times what we feel on the surface. That’s where a car would be crushed immediately like an aluminum can, but where magnificent animals live anyway:

That pressure is almost inco…