Same thing happens to my empty plastic water bottles when I cap them at altitude before descent- they implode from the pressure change by the time we're on the ground.
Ambient atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi).... If you had a container with significantly less psi inside it, then the material the container is made of had better be able to withstand the pressure differential over every square inch of it's body or you get what you saw in the video. Let's say the radius of that vessel was 60 inches and the length of the vessel was 8 feet or 96 inches. That would give it a surface area of 58,781 in². If there was an internal pressure differential of just -6 psi, this means that there was a compressive force of more than 350,000 lbs. or 178 tons on it. I work in a feild of medicine called hyperbaric medicine. We treat people with poor circulation and wounded limbs who are in danger of recieving an amputaion. Normal wound healing is an oxygen dependant process and since blood carries oxygen to all the tissues of the body, for a person with a minor scrape, oxygen delivery can mean the difference between wound healing and amputaion. We place these patients inside a hyperbaric chamber and fill it with 100% oxygen. Then we actually force more oxygen inside the chamber therby increasing the pressure to 29.4 - 44.1 psi. This forces the oxygen molecules closer together. Normally, oxygen is chemically attached to a blood molecule called hemeglobin while it is transported, but at hyperbaric pressures, we can actually disolve oxygen into the blood plasma... the fluid part of the blood... basically turning the pateint into an oxygen soda can... After 90 minutes at the therapeutic pressure, oxygen starved tissue absorbs enough oxygen to remain saturated for up to 4 hours after the therapy is over. Now the physiology can do it's thing to heal the wound. Oh yeah... the topic... physiologically, hyperbaric compression is the same as landing in an airplane or descent on a scuba dive. Patients have to "clear their ears" by swallowing and yawning among other things. Often, they are allowed to take a bottle of water inside to keep their mouth wet... medical grade oxygen is also a very dry gas. Patients who forget to crack the top of the bottle see the water bottles compress while the volume of the gas around them grows smaller... but the real fun occurs when they forget to crack the bottle on decompression... now the volume of the gas is expanding and exerting explosive pressure from the inside out!! Nothing too serious... just a few hyperbaric showers... Always fun to watch...
Ever gotten to take a chamber ride yourself and experience hypoxia? If you haven't, you should try it sometime. The symptoms at onset can vary every time you experience it, and your time of useful consciousness depends in part on how fast the decompression occurs.
You're thinking of a hypobaric chamber... Chambers used to decrease pressure that pilots and mountain climbers use to acclimate themselves to less than atmospheric pressure... and yes, I've had the privilege of decompressing to 10,000 feet at the hypobaric chamber at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, TX. I mainly felt out of breath and a eery feeling of impending doom that I can not explain.... Weird.
I did 4 chamber rides in the Navy, all up to 25000 FT. At the rate they decompress you you're fully hypoxic in about 5-10 minutes.
Now that I think about it, my reaction to the altitude chamber must have been psycological... I've driven through mountains in Arizona high as 12,000 feet without even noticing...
