🤯 Did You Know (click to read)
The deepest parts of the ocean exert more pressure than the weight of 50 jumbo jets stacked on a single human body.
Baird’s beaked whale, a deep-diving cetacean found in the North Pacific, has been recorded diving to depths approaching 3,000 meters, where water pressure exceeds 300 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level. At these depths, sunlight never penetrates and temperatures hover just above freezing.
💥 Impact (click to read)
At nearly two miles down, the pressure is strong enough to crush conventional submarines and implode unprotected equipment. Yet this mammal survives by collapsing its lungs safely, slowing its heart rate dramatically, and storing extraordinary amounts of oxygen in its blood and muscles.
These dives allow the whale to hunt deep-sea squid in an environment more hostile than outer space. Understanding how it withstands such pressure is now informing human research into hypoxia tolerance and extreme-environment survival physiology.
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