• Question: What is has the highest pressure on earth?

    Asked by . to Craig, Flavia, Giuditta, Jack, Sheona on 7 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Jack Carlyle

      Jack Carlyle answered on 7 Nov 2015:

      The hgihest pressure on the surface (at a “normal” height, sea-level) is in Siberia – but the pressure in the core is way, way, WAY higher.

    • Photo: Flavia de Almeida Dias

      Flavia de Almeida Dias answered on 7 Nov 2015:

      1 atmosphere is the pressure we experience while at sea level, from the gases surrounding Earth. As another example, every time we go down in water by 10m, this is equivalent to another atmosphere of pressure. If you ever tried to go deep in a swimming pool or the sea, you know how much it hurts your ears to go down only a couple meters!

      The pressure in the inner core of Earth is about 360 gigapascal, equivalent to 3,600,000 atmospheres!

      We can also produce very high pressure in materials in the lab, by sending a laser-induced shock wave through a sample that is pre-compressed inside a diamond-anvil cell. The highest pressure produced in the lab using such methods is 100.000 gigapascal – or about 278 times the pressure in the Earth’s core, and about the 10 times the estimated pressure inside Jupiter’s core. Talk about working under pressure!

    • Photo: Giuditta Perversi

      Giuditta Perversi answered on 8 Nov 2015:

      It depends on where on the Earth you are referring to!

      If you are on the sea level, the pressure that you experience is the one coming from the whole mass of air of the atmosphere you live in weighting on top of you, that why in science you call it “1 atm (atmosphere)”. It’s an easy reference.
      If you go on top of the Everest, on the other hand, you are so high up that you have much less atmosphere to weight on top of you. The pressure would be a third of the one on sea level, so 0.33 atm.
      If you dive down in the deep ocean, say roughly 2500 m down, of course it gets worse because you have the atmosphere AND the water weighting on you, it can get something like 250 atm!

      Of course the Earth is really big, so the more towards the centre you go, the higher the pressure will be!
      As Flavia said, you get up to 3600000 atm, because you have atmosphere + several km of water + thousands of km of different rocks weighting on you…the weight of the world!

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