Dropping The Empire State Building In The Ocean

What would really happen if you sealed every window of the Empire State Building and dropped it into the ocean? It weighs 365,000 tons, but it's mostly air: by our arithmetic from its official figures, a perfectly watertight version would be only about a third as heavy as the same volume of seawater, so it would bob back up. It's far too tall and thin to float upright, so it would tip over and float on its side, still sitting roughly 40 to 70 feet deep, deeper than New York Harbor's 50-foot shipping channels. (A real building's windows would burst and it would flood and sink; this is the idealised, perfectly sealed version.) Sources: Empire State Building fact sheet (365,000 tons; 37 million cubic feet; 1,454 ft to the antenna); US Army Corps of Engineers, New York & New Jersey Harbor Deepening Project (50-foot channels); National Park Service, Statue of Liberty statistics (305 ft from the ground to the torch). Buoyancy, floating position and depths are our own calculations from these figures. Building footprints: © OpenStreetMap contributors. #whatif #physics #empirestatebuilding #newyork