-1

Imagine you have a container ship with an extremely heavy mass on it. Why does the water level on the ship drop when the mass is placed in water?

mcodesmart
  • 3,219
Alex Crooks
  • 1

1 Answers1

0

This is an excellent problem. It is counter intuitive, so the following drawing might help:

enter image description here

Assuming the volume of the sphere is small, it will not displace a lot of water when at the bottom of the pool. However, if it's placed on top of the boat, the boat will now have to displace enough water to support the extra weight of the lead sphere. The volume of water displaced when lead sphere is on the boat is: Volume_water displaced=Weight of boat/rho_water*g

This quality is much larger then the volume of the sphere if the density of the lead sphere is much larger than the density of water.

LOUIS D
  • 53