how far can electricity travel in water?

Question

even if its in the ocean?

Answer 1

The ocean a bad conductor? Somebody needs to at least google a bit before spouting off. Anyhow, as previously stated, a point source of electricity in the ocean will be dispersed rapidly. Think of it like this, you have electricity moving in a wire, then connect the wire to a solid piece of copper the size of a house. The metal block will still receive the electricity, and it will travel throughout (mostly on the surface), but you can imagine that the charge density would be much smaller than the wire.

When you talk of electricity traveling, you are probably thinking about circuits and wires. In bodies of salt water, nothing confines the electricity, so it disperses. So for it to 'travel', you need a source of current and a sink to set up a flow. This flow will depend on the electrical parameters of your system.

However, if you have completely pure water (deionized), the resistance to electrical currents is very high (~18 MΩ·cm), so the electricity doesn't want to go there. Salt water will have various resistances based on ionic content. Typical ocean values could be in the kΩ·cm range.

As to how far it will travel, it then just becomes a problem of overcoming the resistance with enough current. With extremely large potentials, great distances can be 'traveled'. Hope this sheds some light...

Answer 2

One way to look at this is to consider people who try to detect electric things in water, and these are people looking for submarines. A typical submarine, which acts kind of like a really large battery, generates electricity that can be detected with a very sensitive volt-meter, maybe 1000 or 2000 meters from the submarine. At larger distances, interfering electric noise becomes louder than the signal. The sources of noise may also be very far away (lightning ANYWHERE on earth is detected almost anywhere in the ocean, but this is because the electricity travels mainly along the boundaries, and not *through* the ocean.

In summary, the ocean is one of the worst conductors of electricity when compared to air and solid materials.

Answer 3

All the way. "Pure water" is not conductive, but its also hard to achieve. In practice, water usually has ions in it which allow current to pass. The more ions, the lower the resistance. Sea water is very conductive. Someone once made a communication system across a stretch of water where they created an electric field normal to the water channel, which was detectable at the other side of the channel as a potential difference. Its not very efficient though.

Answer 4

Inside pure water, electricity will not travel anywhere. It is the various dissolved ions in water that permits electricity to travel in it. Electricity can probably travel indefinitely inside water with ions until the voltage and current of the electricity dies out due to the resistance.

Answer 5

indefinetly, it only gets dispersed too much so that the electrical charge becomes insignificant. (non-pure) Water is a nice conductor though