Rachel Lance

This doesn't sound very pleasant.

The same risk of injury occurs because of that sudden impact and that sudden infinite rate of pressure increase with the shockwave.

So as the wave is traveling through you, it can actually travel through most of the body fairly easily.

like the arms and the legs, below a certain threshold, it'll just pass through them without a lot of harm.

But the lungs and any other gas-containing organs have that air.

Again, we talked about how sound travels more easily underwater.

Now it's hitting air.

So at the surface of those air pockets, you have an effect called spalling, which is essentially where the shockwave is forced to slow down, and you get this spray of blood that goes into those gas pockets.

That's part of what happened at the start of World War II.

A lot of people were in the water because there's so much naval combat happening.

There were U-boats terrorizing the Atlantic and these ships would go down, including like the USS Midway and the USS Yorktown.

would go down and they would have their sailors waiting in the water and then either a depth charge would go off or the U-boat would set off for a torpedo and that shockwave would travel and hit the sailors.

Then all of a sudden, you've got sailors in the water with massive internal bleeding and no external signs of injury.

So this was a huge mystery at the start of the war that had been really understudied.

And the physicians and the scientists were kind of scrambling.

It was the same thing as trying to survive underwater.

And in the submarines, they were hit by all of this new technology.

They didn't know what was going on and they had to study it all at once.

They basically looked at what we look at today, which is people who have already been hurt through circumstances other than intentional introduction.

But then because the war became so severe, that's when you start to see people experimenting on themselves.