COULD rising bubbles really sink a ship? It sounds far-fetched, but lab tests
have proved that bubbles can sink floating objects. The findings add weight to
suggestions that methane bubbles escaping from methane reserves in the seabed
might have been to blame for vessels disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle and
the North Sea.
The Greek mathematician Archimedes realised that for something to float, the
density of the liquid has to be greater than the density of the object. So a
simple argument is that if you mix enough bubbles into a liquid to lower its
average density, an object floating…
