• Question: if i jump off a 50ft high pier what kills me first the hitting the water or drowning

    Asked by klbihateskoda to Freya, Katy, Louise, Pamela on 15 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Louise Pendry

      Louise Pendry answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      A question for the physics scientists me thinks. Also depends on whether you pick the part of the pier that overlooks the water only. If you hit a steel girder or the concrete might be a different answer entirely (and a rather messy one at that…)!

      Seriously though, I have no idea but I’d be interested to know. I do know that we have a sort of similar thing in veterinary practice called ‘high-rise syndrome’. Basically cats falling out of high rise flat windows and getting injured. Apparently cats that fall from 6+ stories high suffer less severe trauma than those falling from lower stories. Would be interesting to know if the same applies in humans and this might affect the answer to your question. See if you can find the answer online and report back 🙂

    • Photo: Katy Milne

      Katy Milne answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      At university, we had to work out how long it would take for a human to die from hypothermia if they were dropped in the North Sea. We had to decide whether a helicopter would be able to reach them from the nearest airport before they became unconscious. Grim! We assumed that the person was a certain size and shape (added fat might be insulating but you might have a bigger surface area and so cool faster), that the person was not wearing any special suits to keep them warm, that the water temperature was 10degrees and constant, that the body temperature was not affected by wind chill and that they would become unconscious and drown when they reached a certain temperature.

      Make a list of assumptions – about how you dive, whether you can swim etc and then maybe you will be able to work out the answer. Just don’t try it.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      At 50ft (15m) you are well under terminal velocity, so a little bit of math suggests that you would hit the water at about 17 m/s (38 m.p.h).

      If you were not careful about the way you entered the water, then you might break a bone or fracture your skull and you would certainly give yourself quite a shock. Both of these would impair your ability to swim.

      So in my non-medical opinion, if you were daft enough to jump and not protect yourself, and you weren’t rescued quickly, then you would probably die from drowning because you’d be unable to rescue yourself.

    • Photo: Pamela Docherty

      Pamela Docherty answered on 15 Mar 2010:

      If the impact didn’t kill you then why would you drown? Jumping 50ft into water wouldn’t necessarily kill you. There’s some cool videos on YouTube of people doing higher jumps than that.

    • Photo: Freya Harrison

      Freya Harrison answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Well, I was thinking about this and I reckon what would kill you would depend a lot on how deep the water is. Assuming you weigh around 50 kilos, you’d hit the water surface with a force of 500 Newtons. (50 kilos x acceleration due to gravity, if I’m remembering A-level mechanics correctly). The resistance of the water and your buoyancy would slow you down, so you’d want there to be enough water between you and the bottom of the sea to either stop your descent before you hit the bottom, or slow you down enough to hit the bottom gently.

      In shallow water, you’d go straight through and crash on to the bottom. Depending on how you landed and whether you rolled, you might be all right. If you landed on your head I guess you’d easily break your skull or your neck, or if you landed on your feet you could break your legs. The first of those might could kill you outright, or it might paralyse or stun you enough that you’d drown. If you hit the water flat on your back or your stomach, you’d probably stand a better chance of surviving as there would be enough surface area of your body for the water to resist you and slow you down (but it would really hurt when you hit the water).

      This is why tombstoning is a really bad idea!

      And of course there are lots of other interesting things that could happen… you could jump of the pier and land in the middle of a swarm of jellyfish, which is what happened to one of my friends in Spain…ouch!

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