[Physics] Will a penny ever stand still in the water at a certain depth

buoyancydensityfluid-staticspressure

Let’s say I drop a penny in the deepest part of the ocean having a certain depth. Would the penny become buoyant enough to stand still in the water, since the density of water increases with depth? Since the buoyancy of objects becomes greater as the density of water increases, would a penny ever come to a stand still, and if so, what would be an estimated depth of the water? I asked my science teacher this and she couldn’t answer it.

Best Answer

The answer is no. Water, being a liquid, is nearly incompressible, meaning that the density changes very little with increasing pressure. In the very deep ocean, the pressure can approach $10^{8}$ Pa (about a thousand times greater than standard atmospheric pressure of $1.01\times10^{5}$ Pa). However, the bulk modulus $B$ of liquid water (the reciprocal of the compressibility) is even larger, at about $2\times10^{9}$ Pa. ($B$ actually varies with the pressure and temperature with the water, but not enough to make a practical difference.) The ratio of the ambient pressure $P$ to the bulk modulus $B$ gives you roughly how much fractional change there will be in the density of water when it is under the pressure $P$.

This ratio is about $0.05$, so even at the greatest depths of the ocean, the changes to the density of the water will be, at most, about five percent. Actual differences in ocean density often have more to do with differences in the salinity of the water (since the dissolved sodium and chloride ions adds extra mass); however, these changes are also small, also at the level of a few percent at most. To determine whether a penny will float or sink, we only need to compare the density of the penny to the benthic density of the water. Modern pennies are made mostly of zinc, while before 1982, they were mostly made of copper. The specific gravities of these metals are $7.0$ and $9.0$, respectively (under atmospheric pressure; they would be slightly greater at $10^{8}$ Pa), making them both several times more dense than seawater (specific gravity of $1.0$, plus or minus a few percent). So a penny would sink to the bottom. Only an object that is very close to the density of water at the surface can find an eventual equilibrium point where its density is equal to that of very deep water.