Fun Fact of the Week: Buoyancy

Floating Stuff. There’s a lot of it. Let’s take a look at some of the most novel floating objects in the world. 

In recent news: 

The famous door from the dramatic climatic scene of Titanic recently sold for auction for $718,750. The Mythbusters did an episode in 2012 showing that Jack could have, in fact, survived, had he taken Rose’s life vest and tied it around the underside of the door to provide additional buoyancy. James Cameron, evidently feeling the need to vindicate his directorial choices, claimed in an interview that the trick of tying the life vest under the door would have proven too difficult in the 28° water, and that the Mythbusters were “full of shit.”

Science says: 

Liquid mercury is the age-old classic of dense material, and it’ll float nickel, copper, or iron any day. However, the true ideal would be liquid osmium, the liquid form of the densest metal, although it has a melting point of ~3,000 ° Celsius, so that might be a bit too hot to handle. 

Buildings:

The Uros Islands on Lake Titicaca, which is on the border of Peru and Bolivia, are not actually islands, but rather 120 distinct man-made clumps of reeds upon which the Uru people reside. Each island only lasts for about 25 years before another one needs to be built, using an age-old process. Most of these islands have houses or other such structures, many with solar-powered electricity. They even have their own radio station. 

In a similar vein, on Lake Lagos, the silt house village of Makoko was graced with the addition of an A-frame floating school, designed by Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi. It was constructed using mostly locally sourced materials, and floats on plastic barrels strong enough to hold the structure and 100 students who often canoe to school. It was designed to be a prototype building, easily constructible to provide education to areas with poor infrastructure. 

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, 4-story tall floating apartments seem to be not too big of a deal. Particularly Waterbuurt, Amsterdam (AKA, the ‘water quarter’), which is a neighborhood of the city made entirely of floating homes. 

On an entirely different note:

The world's largest rubber duck weighs 15.5 tons, stands at 60 feet tall, and was created as a part of an event dedicated to spreading kindness. Although it does not float in water, it does come equipped with steel pontoons capable of floating 29,000 pounds of material. The beast is known as “Mama Duck,” and at a certain point, a “baby duck,” only 10 feet tall, joined her on her world tour.