If an Ant Falls from a 63-Story Building, Does It Die?

The internet has spawned all sorts of absurd questions, but some become so popular that they end up getting a scientific verification one way or another. That was essentially what MythBusters did, but the question that has us on edge today comes from far-off South Korea: If an ant falls from a 63-story building, does it die? The answer led to a series of mathematical and physical calculations, but ultimately took a dramatic twist no one expected…

In the 1990s there was a South Korean show whose title translates to something like "The Sky of Curiosity", an apparent mix between MythBusters and "Believe It or Not", which presented strange questions to the public and tried to get answers with scientific foundations. Apparently, a Korean Twitter user decided to post one of the questions that an episode was based on... If an ant falls from a 63-story building, does it die?

The Ant's Fall

First, the theoretical side of the question was explored. An ant weighs (on average) about 2.5 milligrams (it can be more or less depending on the species), and the initial numbers gave it very good chances of survival (its terminal velocity would be too low), but the only way to confirm it was to drop one from a skyscraper.

The story (or should we say "urban legend" at this point, since there is no evidence) tells that the show's hosts went to the "63 Building", a skyscraper in Seoul. The "63" in the name is a bit misleading, since counting from the ground the floors are 60, but it is 250 meters high without counting the antenna on the roof, so it should be more than enough for the experiment, right? Well... no.

The Ants Exploded

The show's hosts encountered an effect that no one had taken into account when making the calculations: The ants exploded. Yes, the word is "exploded", and the reason was none other than the change in atmospheric pressure. Humans don't have major issues going from the ground floor to the 60th floor in a couple of minutes, but such a transition was deadly for ants. We don't know if they survive the fall, because supposedly they never made it to the top.

Any attempt to reproduce this experiment today would probably be blocked due to safety measures in skyscrapers with the necessary requirements... but if someone manages to sneak a couple of ants inside a matchbox and go up the Empire State or a similar skyscraper, they could at least try to confirm whether they explode or not... The problem, of course, would be finding the ant after the fall.

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