I’m sure all of us know that water has weight, and that its pressure increases dramatically as the depth increases. Certain fish that exist in the very bottom of the ocean are especially engineered by Hashem to withstand this tremendous pressure. If brought quickly up to the surface, they practically explode. The pressure that Hashem put into their muscular structure is still there on the inside when they are brought up where the pressure is not exerted from the outside.
This is a wonderful fact, but do you realize that we, too, live in the bottom of an atmospheric sea, which also has tremendous weight? At sea level we are living down at the bottom of a very heavy, dense covering. As the ocean is to the fish, so the atmosphere is to us. Every moment we live, a pressure of 14 pounds per square inch is exerted upon our body structure, and that’s pretty heavy. We think a man is strong if he can carry 200 pounds on his back. In fact, the strongest man that ever lived put only 415 pounds over his head. Yet, every single form of life in this world, whether it’s a 90-pound woman or a burly man, has a constant pressure of over 15 tons at sea level pushing and pressing upon them from every direction. That’s 30,000 pounds!
Even the filmy, gauzy insects have been designed by Hashem to withstand their proportion of this pressure. That little gnat, so light and frail that it seems anything could crush it, is built by Hashem to withstand the weight of the atmosphere.
The air, in other words, is heavy. The atmosphere has weight. If you climb a mountain, the higher you climb, the thinner the atmosphere becomes, and you feel distressed and uncomfortable. Why? Because the pressure is not as great. You see, Hashem has built in a certain amount of pressure that balances that on the outside at sea level. If you went high enough, you would be just as stressed as the fish brought up from the ocean depths. How wonderful that Hashem has designed each living creature to be perfectly comfortable in its own environment.