Why do your ears pop when you dive in a deep pool?

Have you ever wondered why your ears pop when you plunge into the deep end of a swimming pool? It's all about keeping your ear drum happy, as this HowStuffWorks podcast reveals.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com,
where smart happens him Marshall Brain was today's question, Why
do your ears pop when you dive in the deep
end of the pool. If you've ever struck your finger
into your ear, you know about the ear canal. Your
ear canal is a tube, and at the end of
the tube is the ear drum, a thin piece of

(00:21):
skin stretched tight like a drum over the end of
the ear canal. You've probably read on a box of
cotton swabs or heard from your mother that you should
never stick anything in your ear. What you want to
avoid is sticking something in that could puncture the ear drum.
On the other side of the ear drum is a
hollow space filled with air called the middle ear. What

(00:42):
you want is for the air in your ear canal
and the air in the middle ear to have the
same pressure. If they do, then the ear drum has
equal pressure on both sides and it is smooth and happy.
In order for the middle ear to equalize its pressure,
there's a thin tube called the us Nation tube that
connects the middle ears air chamber to the throat. Air

(01:05):
can flow back and forth through this tube, and it
keeps the air pressure in the middle ear equal with
the outside air pressure. When you swim in deep water,
there can be a lot of water pressure. If you're
you station tube is clogged or narrowed for any reason,
then your middle ear gets shut off and it becomes
a closed chamber. It holds air at normal pressure, like

(01:27):
fourteen point seven p s i. When you swim to
the bottom of the deep end, the water is pressing
into the ear canal at about nineteen p s i,
so the ear drum bows inward because of the pressure difference.
Since the ear drum is full of nerves, you feel
this bowing as pain. To solve the problem, you can
equalize the pressure. When you start to feel pain in

(01:50):
your ears, hold your nose shut with your fingers and
blow into your nose. You'll hear your ears pop and
the pain should go away. By blowing, you increase the
air pressure and your lungs and throat and it blows
the air up your station tube into the middle ear
to equalize the pressure. When you rise back up to
the surface, the middle ear will contain excess pressure, but

(02:13):
the US station to generally releases it automatically. If not,
try yawning to open it up, or chewing gum or
something that will cause the U station tube deflex and open.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast?
If so, please send me an email at podcast at
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and

(02:33):
thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot
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