Aquaman is a pretty impressive hero — and we don’t just mean because the Jason Momoa-starring film continues to make a splash at the box office. The hero has some truly wild powers, specifically the ability to swim at supersonic speed.
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But, how exactly would that work in the real world? That’s what the folks over at Nerdist’s Because Science YouTube channel decided to check out and while comic book super powers aren’t always the most rooted in real-world science, it turns out that there really is a solid explanation for how the King of the Seven Seas does it.
In the video, which you can check out above, Kyle Hill first breaks down the biggest obstacle to Aquaman‘s swimming speed — drag. Drag is, in basic terms, the various forces that work against an object when they move through anything (in this case specifically through water). He also uses what is canonically Aquaman‘s swimming speed as established in comics — 6800 miles per hour — to figure out that in order to overcome the drag Aquaman would encounter in the water using his own, personally-generated energy the hero would have to eat a truly ridiculous amount of food. How ridiculous? Oh, you know, just enough to fully deplete the entire stock of fish in the whole ocean every 100 days.
Since it’s pretty much impossible for that to happen, the real explanation as to how Aquaman pulls off his mighty feat of supersonic swim speeds comes down then not to energy output but to, in a sense, swimming smarter, not harder. To that end, it appears that Aquaman’s best bet for obtaining high swim speeds is something called supercavitation. Supercavitation is the use of cavitation — the formation of bubbles in liquid, usually by propeller — to create a bubble large enough to encompass an object moving through liquid and reducing the drag forces dramatically, sort of like how a torpedo moves through water.
As the video explains, this appears to be generally the way Aquaman’s swimming speed is actually presented in the film as bubbles are seen around and trailing behind the hero and the other Atlanteans while they’re swimming. There’s also real-world scientific basis for being able to achieve that crazy 6800 mile per hour speed, too. In 1997, the US Navy actually carried out a test of supercavitating projectiles and achieved speeds over half of Aquaman’s velocity. Assuming that Aquaman has specialized, highly-advanced biology, it’s not too much of a stretch to see how the hero could be hitting the mark with his own supercavitation.
While science does a solid job of backing up Aquaman’s intense swim speeds, there are other feats in the DC Extended Universe film that have a bit of science behind them — such as how Atlanteans switch from breathing underwater to breathing on the surface in the film. During a visit to the set of Aquaman, journalists saw a sequence of the film in which Orm essentially vomits water after being stuck in a patch of air. Director James Wan explained the logic behind the expulsion of water, thanks to the science of it all.
“Just from a practical standpoint, people ask me, when they talk, ‘Is it bubbles that come out of their mouth?’” Wan explained. “No, ’cause there’s no air in your lungs, so there wouldn’t be any bubbles, right? Because you don’t do that, right? And, so, then, in that sequence, where you saw Mera open up this air pocket to suck Orm away from Arthur, help him out, now, when he’s breathing, the first thing he does is he using the air pockets, where he could get out all of the water that’s in his lungs.”
What do you think about the science behind Aquaman’s intense swimming speed? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Aquaman is now in theaters. Other upcoming DC films include Shazam! on April 5th, 2019, Joker on October 10th, 2019, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) on February 7th, 2020, and Wonder Woman 1984 on June 5th, 2020.
