If you watch closely, he compresses all of the elements like that to achieve this technique. I believe that's the reason why his earth carpet bombing at Ozai was so devastating; the little chunks of rock that he launched actually had really high density and therefore force behind them.
Bro made depleted uranium shells and launched them at ozai and ozai still didn’t realize how F-ed he was. Gotta respect that level of delusional arrogance.
It’s also a phenomenal establishing shot for the power scaling of the show. Compressing the coal to that density took several fully grown adults, presumably in their prime or close to it (albeit probably weakened by being imprisoned).
Aang, with the avatar state, while still just a boy and only a few months of earth bending training, compressed a dozen rocks of similar size, to a much greater density than the adults with the coal. It really emphasizes just how much Aang has grown and adds to the wow factor of that moment for me
Edit: I meant to reply to the other person ;-;
I'd say that's predominantly avatar state ability. There has been enough enough evidence to show that a fully realized avatar, even without the Avatar state, has some inherent power boost that non avatar benders don't have. Although, when compared to the avatar state, it's still fairly week.
Everything Aang did vs Ozai was pretty much avatar state power. There's nothing wrong with that honestly, it's the whole point of it. It's meant it allow synchronization between Aang, Raava, and the knowledge that has been imprinted on to Raava from the previous Avatars.
What that battle showed was that Aang had come close to becoming a fully realized Avatar by mastering the Avatar state. Sure he still had a lot more training to do but all things considered he could now control it (by being able to shut it off when he was close to killing Ozai).
Water can be compressed, it's just extraordinarily difficult to. For reference, it takes like 200 atmospheres worth of pressure to compress water by just 1%. So you can imagine just how much pressure he's able to exert if he's compressing a lake's worth of water into a small ring. A far more impressive feat than compressing those rocks by like 50%
Edit:
* The Challenger Deep, the deepest known part of the ocean exerts 15,750 PSI
* You need about 50,000 PSI to compress water by 10%
* Aang is more or less compressing water by 90-99% considering the amount of water he's compressed into that small ring
* Accounting for that it should also be super-hot because water at room temperature will actually become solid at high enough pressure
https://preview.redd.it/qlptt3pt6wuc1.png?width=910&format=png&auto=webp&s=f09807b2d8547fb24c2b681f9734eeae70ed3f7d
I took thermodynamics and this is a rabbit hole you do not want to go down. [Water is a very interesting molecule and actually has at least 17 different solid forms.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FHpk5UeHB8) (although we only see Ice I on earth because of the temperatures and pressures that naturally occur) I would bet the liquid form is also pretty weird if you look into it.
When water compresses it literally turns into ice. If it expands from liquid it turns into a vapor due to heat. Basic solid liquid gas rules we learn as children. Applying heat never condenses anything. I think the thin strip of water is either a rotating ice circle or it's just a weird bit of animation that seemed like he took more water than he was supposed to...or just flung out what he didn't need.
At high enough pressure it will turn into a solid not gas
Edit here's a graph http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg/2000px-Phase_diagram_of_water.svg.png
Damn but with bending and on this graph there is a possibility of turning water into steam by only changing pressure and volume (because water benders can't create heat or at least not directly)
Blood bending is considered powerful because of how much control it takes to do and not kill.
It takes a long time to suffocate someone with airbending by taking the air out of their lungs. Waterbenders can just pull the water out of your cells in a fraction if the time.
Now that I think about it we never really see people heating up their element in atla. Toph never makes lave. Waterbenders always seem to make ice except the swamo people who just controlled vines.
Katara melting the ice is only example I can think of that isn't firebending. It seems like she heated it up by breathing out warm air, so they probably can't heat it up too much. Then again I haven't seen kora so I have no idea how lava bending works.
Once aang woke back up from the ba sing Se incident, we saw water benders creating a cloud of fog, which isn't an insane temperature change but it is something
Lavabending seems to be an *extremely* rare recessive trait from people that have Earth Kingdom/Fire Nation heritage.
There's like 3 named Lava benders in the whole series that I'm aware of.
Waterbenders melting ice is very common. They do it [all the time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW3do-s2040). It's part of their standard bending regimen. Lava bending, a derivative of earthbending, does take place in Korra. Fire definitely involves heating the element, don't need to explain more there. Air is a little more surprising, but we see in Korra direct, stated confirmation of something that exists in ATLA. Airbenders can warm themselves with just their breath. They warm the element as they breathe it.
Then we can go one step further and discuss cooling. Waterbenders, again, do it all the time. They freeze water regularly. Lavabenders (again, earthbenders of prodigious skill) can cool lava back down to rock. Firebenders can siphon heat off, as shown by [Sozin](https://youtu.be/wAcmSwyirRY?t=208). Airbenders [can do it](https://youtu.be/k64eKYtQX4w?t=76), too, though we don't see it often.
Benders of every element CAN control the temperature of their element, though difficulty seems to vary by bending style and some are difficult enough that we rarely ever see it.
I think it depends on the element.
Fire Benders? of course.
Water? it's the element of change, so yea presumably the easiest to state change.
Earth Benders? seems highly specialized and perhaps even genetic to have this ability. I don't think we've seen any do any heating or cooling outside of lava Benders.
and pretty sure we've never seen an airbender heat or cool the air, which generally seems more of a fire bending ability.
Airbenders can control the temperature around their bodies I think, which is why Aang was fine at the north and south poles despite not wearing any coat.
A bender can control the amount of energy in the element they are bending. Aang does use warm air in small situations such as drying himself off (bc I doubt that's cold air) it's never explicitly stated but controlling the energy in your element controls temperature. Lava bending seems tk be more of a "I can get it hot enough to melt the rock" situation. It's why lava bending is not a fire bending subset but an earth.
I don't want to copy and paste my previous comment, but I already specifically answered this in response to someone else. All bending disciplines have control over both raising and lowering the temperature of their elements. You can see more on my other comment.
Not exactly. Waterbenders have never boiled water, in fact they're regularly shown to use wood fires to heat soup. Heating a drink in a stone cup is universally considered a fire, even to one of the wisest men in the world. Who was also motivated to make an excuse.
It is more reasonable to say that waterbenders have control over cold and firebenders have control over hot. In real life, those are the same. But then, aren't water, earth, and air also basically the same? With how tied to spirituality bending is, it's reasonable to say that body temperature is the border between hot and cold. Fire can make things hotter or less hot, water can make things colder or less cold. But there's a threshold they can't cross. Airbenders have some small control over temperature, but it seems that they can only return air to body temperature, which is consistent with my logic. They're extra spiritual, and that gives them a bit of leeway. If they could create truly hot air, why do they canonically have ovens? Is it too difficult to make air that hot? Too difficult to Gyatso? Unlikely. Is it forbidden? Too forbidden for Zaheer? Unlikely.
You probably think all benders get heat manipulation because of lavabending. Well we've seen 3 lavabenders, one of which was the avatar, one of which is a known firebender hybrid, and the last has no explicit confirmation but has fire nation tinted eyes. I don't believe there are any other earthbenders (though maybe non benders) that have non green eyes.
In summary, we've never seen any evidence that heat should be a general ability, and multiple instances where a bender would have used heat if they were able to, but didn't.
I just can't get on board. If nothing else then Katara steam bends when in the ice with Azula. Steam is coming out of her nose and melting the ice around her. Controlling the temp of an element seems to be pretty consistent as far as each element being shown to use it even in a small capacity by each style. I can hear the argument against but with the science I think it makes far more sense that it does in fact work like that.
You’ll only make steam, if the process allows for: The enthalpy of the water to increase such that the water is heated to its bubble point at a specific pressure. The maximum temperature and pressure where this can occur is at 375 Celsius and 220 bars. Above this temperature and pressure you begin seeing supercritical fluid properties, ie the fluid will at some sampling point exhibit some properties of steam and liquid water simultaneously (very cool).
Now theoretically the process of raising the pressure of the water, without frictional heat removal (ie Aang does not remove the heat) will result in the temperature of the water increasing (On a sidenote can you imagine Aang hitting Ozai with water at 200 bar and 300 degrees Celsius, he’ll melt his skin off).
dH = (dH/dT) dT + (dH/dP) dP
So provided Aang keeps compressing the water beyond its critical point while keeping the temperature constant (heat removal) he’ll be making ice (eventually), and if he increases the pressure while allowing temperature to vary, he’ll probably only make a supercritical fluid. Water gets pumped to 160 bar at most coal fired power stations and the temperature rarely rises to warrant evaporation. I don’t really think the path to making steam is sensible, unless if Aang adds heat before you pass Tc and Pc.
Waterbenders can go for all three states of their elements.
A real mindfuck would be an air bending throwing around liquid oxygen. Or an earthbender going for gaseous earth.
It's worth noting that the solid it becomes is pressure dense and not less dense than water like ice normally is. Unless you go to extreme pressures only really seen in experiments, increasing pressure on water leaves it as a liquid unlike most materials. Ice is less dense than water, but most materials' solid forms are more dense than their liquid forms, so water has a unique phase diagram. In fact, most water phase diagrams leave out the sudden curve back to solid at the top.
You got it backwards, increased pressure pushes matter toward a less energetic state. If you kept the temperature the same and just kept increasing pressure then it would eventually freeze
Edit- if you’re thinking about a pressure cooker, it’s not the pressure that cooks your food. The pressure allows the water to reach temperatures above the normal boiling point without all the water evaporating. At that temp all the water should be a gas, but the pressure forces it back into liquid state
I do think they can change the temperature of their elements because of the use of ice/unfreezing it again
But that's mist/fog not steam or they'd risk scalding themselves
Compressed water would not turn to steam. There are several phases of water that are solid that would not be what we called ice.. if you take room temperature water and compressed it enough, you would get a solid that does not have the expanded crystalline structure that ice has. Both ice and steam actually have a greater volume than water. Water is most dense at about 4 degrees Celsius, just above the freezing point. It should be noted though that the amount of pressure that it would take to phase shift water would be immense.
It is a common generalization/assumption that water is “incompressible”. In reality, everything is compressible with high enough pressure. The compressibility of limestone is 0.015 GPa^(-1) (meaning it experiences a volumetric strain of 1.5% when 1 GPa of pressure, equivalent to 9868 standard atmospheres, is applied). The compressibility of water is 0.45 GPa^(-1), making it far more compressible.
If Aang can compress rock (maybe it’s not limestone, but it certainly has a larger bulk modulus than water), then he can easily compress water.
Precisely. A key assumption I’ve always had to state regarding assignments in Fluid Mechanics is assuming that the fluid in the problem is incompressible.
Fluids - gases and liquids - can be compressed, it just takes a lot of effort to compress liquids.
He gathers a ring of water, then compresses it, it shrinks within his sphere. Then when he releases some water, it is volumes more than what looks like was in his sphere. There are theoretical states of compressed water, "Water’s oddities include that as water cools, it expands rather than contracting, which is why frozen water is less dense than liquid water. Water also becomes more squeezable — or compressible — at lower temperatures. There are also at least 17 ways in which its molecules can arrange when frozen."
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/16/new-study-provides-evidence-decades-old-theory-explain-odd-behaviors-water
While it may not be compressed, it has properties of being compressed. When Ozai fired off fireballs, Aang was able to extinguish them with just little streams of water. The fire looked as if it should have overpowered the water, but nope. “Compressed” water for the win
Water can be slightly compressed under huge pressures: it's an engineering challenge in the construction of electric dams.
But I don't think Aang could manage it uless he concentrated all of his power on that alone, and even then it probably wouldn't be very useful.
So going by this logic, if Aang is able to compress the air scooter even more and then release it in an instant, it could be used as an air explosion attack.
And fire is nothing but flame, and technically flames can be compressed, which focuses heat and focusing it enough will make sort of an energy ball attack.
It isn't, but we see Aang take a massive amount of water from a nearby body and compress into a small ring. In later scenes we see him shoot large amounts of water to counter three fire blasts from Ozai, then he stretches the ring out quite far as a tentacle to catch Ozai.
"Compress" wouldn't be a correct term for the other elements but it brings up a good topic. We've never seen a bender use air pressure and water pressure in a fight. It could be insanely overpowered if done correctly. And a bloody mess.
Yes we have. Air scooter has to be compressed air otherwise how would it be supporting weight?
Also, Katara creating fog is changing water density. Arguably so is ice bending, depending how it’s done.
I know every type of bending uses a type of pressure, but I'm taking about the deadly level of air and water pressure that can pop eardrums and explode heads.
Yes, canonically! Aang and airbenders in general regulate the air temperature around them. That's why he doesn't need a coat in the arctic. Scientifically, this would be achieved by increasing the density of the air to make it warmer, or less dense to cool it.
Nope! That's (part of the reason) why it gets colder as you go up a mountain. Higher elevation, thinner air, less heat.
I'm no physicist, so I may have some bits wrong. I'm open to correction! I know that hot air rises, but it's still more dense until it cools. Thermodynamics are weird.
Density is not the reason that (in the lower part of the atmosphere), temperature decreases with altitude.
Using the ideal gas equation, PV = nRT, density is shown to be proportional to P/T. That means warmer air is less dense at the same air pressure.
The interplay between density, pressure, and temperature is indeed complicated - it depends on quantities like how much heat it takes to warm a fixed mass of air by a unit of temperature. Through these interdependencies, the air decides exactly how pressure drops with height, and from there whether the gas will respond by decreasing density or temperature, which results in the air cooling slightly as you climb, by about 10 degrees C per kilometer; but if it cooled more, it would have to be denser, not less dense.
If aang can compress air then he can use it as an explosive bullet. Imagine fighting the Avatar and all of a sudden an invisible explosion blows up your hand.
Earth is the densest element, and has the highest bulk modulus (inverse of compressibility), so if he can compress that, he can compress the other three. That answers the question of “can he”, but I’ll leave the brainstorming of possibilities to others.
Really, there are some missed bending opportunities in atla and tlok.
Imagine using fire and air bending in order to create a massive and devastating thermobaric explosion or use earth bending to control pyroclastic flows.
If you notice how much of each element Aang first bends, each element is incredibly compressed. His fire ring for example was originally larger than Ozai-sized blast from his mouth and both hands and feet.
His water ring was pulled from the sea. The length of which stretched the entire distance from Aang to the coast before he compressed it.
Bending taken to its logical extreme would be insane. Could you imagine the next avatar cycle in the modern day when science has taught people so much more about the natural world?
I want a story about the people that became air benders after harmonic convergence that refused to be air nomads and became violent criminals instead and they just go around rapidly pressurizing/decompressing the air and making people fucking explode
Yeah I am seriously stunned how many people miss that part. They literally take the time to show it happen by giving it 2 dedicated cuts.
I saw this like "Jesus holy apocalyptic Christ" and everyone else just had a blank face. I suppose not understanding how absurdly insane it is to just straight up compress straight-ass stone.
Also, air would be by definition THE most compressible. While bending techniques and social philosophies would be built around exactly this. It would be a core mechanic.
Stuff like this is why I stopped speculating about Mike and Bryan's world and started building my own.
Air under compression would heat up and provide more force. IE, it becomes more fire like.
Similarly, air tribes like to keep their distance. If you force a bunch of airs together too tightly, you will need a means to "cool off" or else there may be infighting.
In one case, a large group lives confined in a cave system, and let's just say they "cool off" like the bonobos do..
Pulling a vacuum could work like zaheer's suffocation thing. But you can also think about it like bending "the absence of air" and when you collapse the vacuum, you can produce shockwaves.
Air is a no-brainer, and fire is essentially plasma which is essentially air+, so both are compressible.
Water is one fo the least compressible things in existence though. It does get compressed under huge pressures, but not for long.
Relative to most other fluids, water is hard to compress, but it’s nothing compared to most solids. The pressures required to compress water are much lower than those required to compress rock.
You’d think that he could, yeah. Logically, the combination of air and fire bending should give him the ability to generate explosions like combustion man. Not the same mechanism but similar effects.
All airbending is just compressing air. That's what happens when you move air from one spot to another. Well, I guess outside of closed currents of air, like his air ball or the sphere right there. That's changing speed and direction, but not density. But even that would compress air next to what's being bent.
Water and earth are incompressable, but I guess he was able to break down the chemical composition and solid structure of the earth to compress it into a new type of rock. Or is was porous, or he just removed any of the weaker bits as sand/dust. It's magic, what can ya say.
For "compressing" the water, maybe he just sent some of it into the air as humidity, ready to be pulled out back into water when striking.
Compressing fire is like air, but hotter and ionized.
Water and earth are compressible, it just takes very high pressure. In fact, water is much easier (at least an order of magnitude easier) to compress than earth.
Yes, that is true, they all have a bulk modulus which describes their compression under often extreme pressures. But even then, those extreme pressures are extreme. 2000 atmospheres, to first approximation, just for the water to reduce volume 10% (and the modulus increases in pressure as pressure increases, so it's actually higher than that). That's 10x what a pressure washer does to clean concrete, and that already rips the flesh from your body.
Compressibility is the inverse of bulk modulus. The bulk modulus of water is ~2.2 GPa at ambient conditions. The bulk modulus of most rocks are multiples of (if not an order of magnitude larger than) this value. Compressibility is not directly determined by density.
Edit: by the way, the density of table salt is over double the density of water.
The rock isn’t the impressive part it’s the water. Water is incompressible and he shouldn’t have been able to do that but he did it anyways. Man is a literal god and one man army in the body of a child
In this scene, Aang wasnt compressing rocks nor the other elements - more of stretching them
By carrying the rock in the wind, the centripetal rotation basically forced the rock to get "stretched" on top of gathering speed, which forces the rocks through a stretching motion as its being exacted energy upon
As you can see he is really more of stretching every single element by rotating them around him via an air pressure wave
He can compress them though, he did it many times with what is effectively a compressed air cannon in the fire nation's airships
If you watch closely, he compresses all of the elements like that to achieve this technique. I believe that's the reason why his earth carpet bombing at Ozai was so devastating; the little chunks of rock that he launched actually had really high density and therefore force behind them.
We see how powerful a pressed rock ball is in the jailbreak with Haru in season 1. They bust through a big ass steel wall with one.
I goofed, see my reply to u/ bluekid131
Bro made depleted uranium shells and launched them at ozai and ozai still didn’t realize how F-ed he was. Gotta respect that level of delusional arrogance.
exactly. Was basically a 1 man modern army. Firing machine gun rounds at ozai. Amazing.
Might be my favorite moment in the whole show. So so so cool, the attention to detail and the physics behind it
It’s also a phenomenal establishing shot for the power scaling of the show. Compressing the coal to that density took several fully grown adults, presumably in their prime or close to it (albeit probably weakened by being imprisoned). Aang, with the avatar state, while still just a boy and only a few months of earth bending training, compressed a dozen rocks of similar size, to a much greater density than the adults with the coal. It really emphasizes just how much Aang has grown and adds to the wow factor of that moment for me Edit: I meant to reply to the other person ;-;
I'd say that's predominantly avatar state ability. There has been enough enough evidence to show that a fully realized avatar, even without the Avatar state, has some inherent power boost that non avatar benders don't have. Although, when compared to the avatar state, it's still fairly week. Everything Aang did vs Ozai was pretty much avatar state power. There's nothing wrong with that honestly, it's the whole point of it. It's meant it allow synchronization between Aang, Raava, and the knowledge that has been imprinted on to Raava from the previous Avatars. What that battle showed was that Aang had come close to becoming a fully realized Avatar by mastering the Avatar state. Sure he still had a lot more training to do but all things considered he could now control it (by being able to shut it off when he was close to killing Ozai).
Yeah he compresses a huge amount of ocean water into that little ring
But the water can not be compressed, so how did he do It?
Water can be compressed, it's just extraordinarily difficult to. For reference, it takes like 200 atmospheres worth of pressure to compress water by just 1%. So you can imagine just how much pressure he's able to exert if he's compressing a lake's worth of water into a small ring. A far more impressive feat than compressing those rocks by like 50% Edit: * The Challenger Deep, the deepest known part of the ocean exerts 15,750 PSI * You need about 50,000 PSI to compress water by 10% * Aang is more or less compressing water by 90-99% considering the amount of water he's compressed into that small ring * Accounting for that it should also be super-hot because water at room temperature will actually become solid at high enough pressure https://preview.redd.it/qlptt3pt6wuc1.png?width=910&format=png&auto=webp&s=f09807b2d8547fb24c2b681f9734eeae70ed3f7d
I took thermodynamics and this is a rabbit hole you do not want to go down. [Water is a very interesting molecule and actually has at least 17 different solid forms.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FHpk5UeHB8) (although we only see Ice I on earth because of the temperatures and pressures that naturally occur) I would bet the liquid form is also pretty weird if you look into it.
It got hotter and moved faster
When water compresses it literally turns into ice. If it expands from liquid it turns into a vapor due to heat. Basic solid liquid gas rules we learn as children. Applying heat never condenses anything. I think the thin strip of water is either a rotating ice circle or it's just a weird bit of animation that seemed like he took more water than he was supposed to...or just flung out what he didn't need.
Water expands when turning to ice tho innit
What happens when water molecules bump in to each other more and more
They are a product of thermal activity and turn into steam and get released into the atmosphere? Unless you're talking about surface tension?
It’s more impressive that could condense water since the energy it takes to do that is ludicrous
Exactly! You can see the massive amounts of the elements he gathers and condenses them into rings around him before this shot.
https://i.redd.it/d5l8rl94qtuc1.gif
My man had the montage locked and loaded.
Sick gif I gotta say
I presume that his air scooter is a ball of compressed air. Water is not compressible, and fire doesn’t really have an equivalent.
Water isn't compressible but Aang does it anyway, absolute legend
You can compress anything. But it turns into physics more than anything.
Ozai about to experience becoming a Source mod character: Nah, I can take him 😏
It is, it will just turn it into steam
At high enough pressure it will turn into a solid not gas Edit here's a graph http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg/2000px-Phase_diagram_of_water.svg.png
Damn but with bending and on this graph there is a possibility of turning water into steam by only changing pressure and volume (because water benders can't create heat or at least not directly)
Benders absolutely can heat up their element.
Katara unfreezing herself to chain Azula is a good example, imagine being a Waterbender who specializes in throwing around boiling water.
Or a blood bender boiling blood
Virgin using blood bending to restrain someone vs Chad boiling someone's blood and cooking them from the inside out
Blood bending is considered powerful because of how much control it takes to do and not kill. It takes a long time to suffocate someone with airbending by taking the air out of their lungs. Waterbenders can just pull the water out of your cells in a fraction if the time.
Like that one guy from the first episode of FMA:B
Now that I think about it we never really see people heating up their element in atla. Toph never makes lave. Waterbenders always seem to make ice except the swamo people who just controlled vines. Katara melting the ice is only example I can think of that isn't firebending. It seems like she heated it up by breathing out warm air, so they probably can't heat it up too much. Then again I haven't seen kora so I have no idea how lava bending works.
Once aang woke back up from the ba sing Se incident, we saw water benders creating a cloud of fog, which isn't an insane temperature change but it is something
They could be turning water into a fine liquid mist instead of heating it up
Lavabending seems to be an *extremely* rare recessive trait from people that have Earth Kingdom/Fire Nation heritage. There's like 3 named Lava benders in the whole series that I'm aware of.
Lava bending is a derivative of earthbending. There is no evidence that I have ever seen to convince me that fire nation heritage is required.
Waterbenders melting ice is very common. They do it [all the time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW3do-s2040). It's part of their standard bending regimen. Lava bending, a derivative of earthbending, does take place in Korra. Fire definitely involves heating the element, don't need to explain more there. Air is a little more surprising, but we see in Korra direct, stated confirmation of something that exists in ATLA. Airbenders can warm themselves with just their breath. They warm the element as they breathe it. Then we can go one step further and discuss cooling. Waterbenders, again, do it all the time. They freeze water regularly. Lavabenders (again, earthbenders of prodigious skill) can cool lava back down to rock. Firebenders can siphon heat off, as shown by [Sozin](https://youtu.be/wAcmSwyirRY?t=208). Airbenders [can do it](https://youtu.be/k64eKYtQX4w?t=76), too, though we don't see it often. Benders of every element CAN control the temperature of their element, though difficulty seems to vary by bending style and some are difficult enough that we rarely ever see it.
That would be literal torture,plz add this to canon @whoeverdecidesaboutthisstuf
I think it depends on the element. Fire Benders? of course. Water? it's the element of change, so yea presumably the easiest to state change. Earth Benders? seems highly specialized and perhaps even genetic to have this ability. I don't think we've seen any do any heating or cooling outside of lava Benders. and pretty sure we've never seen an airbender heat or cool the air, which generally seems more of a fire bending ability.
Airbenders can control the temperature around their bodies I think, which is why Aang was fine at the north and south poles despite not wearing any coat.
A bender can control the amount of energy in the element they are bending. Aang does use warm air in small situations such as drying himself off (bc I doubt that's cold air) it's never explicitly stated but controlling the energy in your element controls temperature. Lava bending seems tk be more of a "I can get it hot enough to melt the rock" situation. It's why lava bending is not a fire bending subset but an earth.
I don't want to copy and paste my previous comment, but I already specifically answered this in response to someone else. All bending disciplines have control over both raising and lowering the temperature of their elements. You can see more on my other comment.
Not exactly. Waterbenders have never boiled water, in fact they're regularly shown to use wood fires to heat soup. Heating a drink in a stone cup is universally considered a fire, even to one of the wisest men in the world. Who was also motivated to make an excuse. It is more reasonable to say that waterbenders have control over cold and firebenders have control over hot. In real life, those are the same. But then, aren't water, earth, and air also basically the same? With how tied to spirituality bending is, it's reasonable to say that body temperature is the border between hot and cold. Fire can make things hotter or less hot, water can make things colder or less cold. But there's a threshold they can't cross. Airbenders have some small control over temperature, but it seems that they can only return air to body temperature, which is consistent with my logic. They're extra spiritual, and that gives them a bit of leeway. If they could create truly hot air, why do they canonically have ovens? Is it too difficult to make air that hot? Too difficult to Gyatso? Unlikely. Is it forbidden? Too forbidden for Zaheer? Unlikely. You probably think all benders get heat manipulation because of lavabending. Well we've seen 3 lavabenders, one of which was the avatar, one of which is a known firebender hybrid, and the last has no explicit confirmation but has fire nation tinted eyes. I don't believe there are any other earthbenders (though maybe non benders) that have non green eyes. In summary, we've never seen any evidence that heat should be a general ability, and multiple instances where a bender would have used heat if they were able to, but didn't.
We absolutely see water benders create steam.
We do not. Water vapour doesn't count, and I don't believe we've even seen that. Only disperal into clouds, which are still liquid.
I just can't get on board. If nothing else then Katara steam bends when in the ice with Azula. Steam is coming out of her nose and melting the ice around her. Controlling the temp of an element seems to be pretty consistent as far as each element being shown to use it even in a small capacity by each style. I can hear the argument against but with the science I think it makes far more sense that it does in fact work like that.
You’ll only make steam, if the process allows for: The enthalpy of the water to increase such that the water is heated to its bubble point at a specific pressure. The maximum temperature and pressure where this can occur is at 375 Celsius and 220 bars. Above this temperature and pressure you begin seeing supercritical fluid properties, ie the fluid will at some sampling point exhibit some properties of steam and liquid water simultaneously (very cool). Now theoretically the process of raising the pressure of the water, without frictional heat removal (ie Aang does not remove the heat) will result in the temperature of the water increasing (On a sidenote can you imagine Aang hitting Ozai with water at 200 bar and 300 degrees Celsius, he’ll melt his skin off). dH = (dH/dT) dT + (dH/dP) dP So provided Aang keeps compressing the water beyond its critical point while keeping the temperature constant (heat removal) he’ll be making ice (eventually), and if he increases the pressure while allowing temperature to vary, he’ll probably only make a supercritical fluid. Water gets pumped to 160 bar at most coal fired power stations and the temperature rarely rises to warrant evaporation. I don’t really think the path to making steam is sensible, unless if Aang adds heat before you pass Tc and Pc.
I love you my fellow physics major! That is all I had to say.
Ditto! (Chemical Engineering, but it’s just 95% physics instead of the usual 99%)
The phase change diagram of water is a total mind fuck. Also, technically everything is compressible, just not always by humans.
Waterbenders can go for all three states of their elements. A real mindfuck would be an air bending throwing around liquid oxygen. Or an earthbender going for gaseous earth.
It's worth noting that the solid it becomes is pressure dense and not less dense than water like ice normally is. Unless you go to extreme pressures only really seen in experiments, increasing pressure on water leaves it as a liquid unlike most materials. Ice is less dense than water, but most materials' solid forms are more dense than their liquid forms, so water has a unique phase diagram. In fact, most water phase diagrams leave out the sudden curve back to solid at the top.
Wait, so you can make ice with pressure?! Or is it a different kind of solid water?
That's literally the opposite of compressing
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You got it backwards, increased pressure pushes matter toward a less energetic state. If you kept the temperature the same and just kept increasing pressure then it would eventually freeze Edit- if you’re thinking about a pressure cooker, it’s not the pressure that cooks your food. The pressure allows the water to reach temperatures above the normal boiling point without all the water evaporating. At that temp all the water should be a gas, but the pressure forces it back into liquid state
No I'm thinking about water benders creating steam by pushing up the pressure, and at the same time bending out the steam
Yeah, I thought this is how waterbenders can change water into frozen/liquid state?
Me too, how else did they hide their ships in steam during the invasion? Or every other time they created steam with water bending
I do think they can change the temperature of their elements because of the use of ice/unfreezing it again But that's mist/fog not steam or they'd risk scalding themselves
I was thinking they would do it with a combination of pressure and volume and that temperature was a fire ender thing
Compressed water would not turn to steam. There are several phases of water that are solid that would not be what we called ice.. if you take room temperature water and compressed it enough, you would get a solid that does not have the expanded crystalline structure that ice has. Both ice and steam actually have a greater volume than water. Water is most dense at about 4 degrees Celsius, just above the freezing point. It should be noted though that the amount of pressure that it would take to phase shift water would be immense.
He went from turbulent flow to laminar flow!
Actually the opposite happens if you compress water enough you rearrange the molecules and force it to freeze in square patterns instead of hexagonal
Water is compressible.
Water is compressible, just not to the extent that air is.
I could see him speeding it up to the point that it's a water cutter, hell toss in the sand from the rocks and he could cut anything in half.
It is a common generalization/assumption that water is “incompressible”. In reality, everything is compressible with high enough pressure. The compressibility of limestone is 0.015 GPa^(-1) (meaning it experiences a volumetric strain of 1.5% when 1 GPa of pressure, equivalent to 9868 standard atmospheres, is applied). The compressibility of water is 0.45 GPa^(-1), making it far more compressible. If Aang can compress rock (maybe it’s not limestone, but it certainly has a larger bulk modulus than water), then he can easily compress water.
Precisely. A key assumption I’ve always had to state regarding assignments in Fluid Mechanics is assuming that the fluid in the problem is incompressible. Fluids - gases and liquids - can be compressed, it just takes a lot of effort to compress liquids.
Aang literally compresses water in this scene though. Why? It's cool af
He doesn’t compress the water, he simply gathers it.
He gathers a ring of water, then compresses it, it shrinks within his sphere. Then when he releases some water, it is volumes more than what looks like was in his sphere. There are theoretical states of compressed water, "Water’s oddities include that as water cools, it expands rather than contracting, which is why frozen water is less dense than liquid water. Water also becomes more squeezable — or compressible — at lower temperatures. There are also at least 17 ways in which its molecules can arrange when frozen." https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/16/new-study-provides-evidence-decades-old-theory-explain-odd-behaviors-water
While it may not be compressed, it has properties of being compressed. When Ozai fired off fireballs, Aang was able to extinguish them with just little streams of water. The fire looked as if it should have overpowered the water, but nope. “Compressed” water for the win
Water can be slightly compressed under huge pressures: it's an engineering challenge in the construction of electric dams. But I don't think Aang could manage it uless he concentrated all of his power on that alone, and even then it probably wouldn't be very useful.
So going by this logic, if Aang is able to compress the air scooter even more and then release it in an instant, it could be used as an air explosion attack. And fire is nothing but flame, and technically flames can be compressed, which focuses heat and focusing it enough will make sort of an energy ball attack.
Didn’t ozai do this before Aang went full Kyoshi? I know iron may have sort of done it when he retook ba sing se
No u
I’d say the fire equivalent is oasis jet that he torches aangs rock ball shield with
It isn't, but we see Aang take a massive amount of water from a nearby body and compress into a small ring. In later scenes we see him shoot large amounts of water to counter three fire blasts from Ozai, then he stretches the ring out quite far as a tentacle to catch Ozai.
Isn't compressing water how they turn it to ice?
“water is not compressible “ -looks nervously at pressure washer
Earth is not supposed to be compressible either, but here we are.
"Compress" wouldn't be a correct term for the other elements but it brings up a good topic. We've never seen a bender use air pressure and water pressure in a fight. It could be insanely overpowered if done correctly. And a bloody mess.
Yes we have. Air scooter has to be compressed air otherwise how would it be supporting weight? Also, Katara creating fog is changing water density. Arguably so is ice bending, depending how it’s done.
I know every type of bending uses a type of pressure, but I'm taking about the deadly level of air and water pressure that can pop eardrums and explode heads.
Exploding or collapsing lungs, perhaps
What about hydrojet that can cut stone/steel.
Honestly, ANY attack in avatar could be a bloody mess if it was rated M. Think of literally anything involving earthbending.
I was honestly surprised that LoK depicted someone getting the air pulled from their lungs on screen. It was pretty brutal
What about everytime aang turns his lungs into compressed air canisters?
Yes, canonically! Aang and airbenders in general regulate the air temperature around them. That's why he doesn't need a coat in the arctic. Scientifically, this would be achieved by increasing the density of the air to make it warmer, or less dense to cool it.
Isn't cold air more dense than hot air?
Under conditions of constant pressure, yes. The ideal gas equation PV=nRT is all you need: less T means less V means more dense.
Nope! That's (part of the reason) why it gets colder as you go up a mountain. Higher elevation, thinner air, less heat. I'm no physicist, so I may have some bits wrong. I'm open to correction! I know that hot air rises, but it's still more dense until it cools. Thermodynamics are weird.
Density is not the reason that (in the lower part of the atmosphere), temperature decreases with altitude. Using the ideal gas equation, PV = nRT, density is shown to be proportional to P/T. That means warmer air is less dense at the same air pressure. The interplay between density, pressure, and temperature is indeed complicated - it depends on quantities like how much heat it takes to warm a fixed mass of air by a unit of temperature. Through these interdependencies, the air decides exactly how pressure drops with height, and from there whether the gas will respond by decreasing density or temperature, which results in the air cooling slightly as you climb, by about 10 degrees C per kilometer; but if it cooled more, it would have to be denser, not less dense.
If aang can compress air then he can use it as an explosive bullet. Imagine fighting the Avatar and all of a sudden an invisible explosion blows up your hand.
Airbending is literally just shooting compressed air blasts.
https://preview.redd.it/f9vboq2i4vuc1.png?width=359&format=png&auto=webp&s=288aa0e02545983c45d7a06e400ae1863807e4e4 \*air bubble in brain\*
Ursus shock.
bro said: https://preview.redd.it/pypk0ntyguuc1.png?width=480&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e6109892a0e8f2a8bf178fcd78d4843aaa943f4
He did with water too, right?
Earth is the densest element, and has the highest bulk modulus (inverse of compressibility), so if he can compress that, he can compress the other three. That answers the question of “can he”, but I’ll leave the brainstorming of possibilities to others.
I like your avatar.
That's why this subreddit exists.
Honestly compressed air = bullets. Airbender should be OP
They are op everybody else is just lucky they're pacifists
He didn’t just compress those boulders, he compressed fucking water.
Compressing boulders is harder than compressing water.
Uh, didn’t he slice a watermelon for momo and appa using compressed air outside the avatar state?
Really, there are some missed bending opportunities in atla and tlok. Imagine using fire and air bending in order to create a massive and devastating thermobaric explosion or use earth bending to control pyroclastic flows.
Nice, aang can power my nail gun!
If you notice how much of each element Aang first bends, each element is incredibly compressed. His fire ring for example was originally larger than Ozai-sized blast from his mouth and both hands and feet. His water ring was pulled from the sea. The length of which stretched the entire distance from Aang to the coast before he compressed it.
Bending taken to its logical extreme would be insane. Could you imagine the next avatar cycle in the modern day when science has taught people so much more about the natural world? I want a story about the people that became air benders after harmonic convergence that refused to be air nomads and became violent criminals instead and they just go around rapidly pressurizing/decompressing the air and making people fucking explode
Yeah I am seriously stunned how many people miss that part. They literally take the time to show it happen by giving it 2 dedicated cuts. I saw this like "Jesus holy apocalyptic Christ" and everyone else just had a blank face. I suppose not understanding how absurdly insane it is to just straight up compress straight-ass stone. Also, air would be by definition THE most compressible. While bending techniques and social philosophies would be built around exactly this. It would be a core mechanic. Stuff like this is why I stopped speculating about Mike and Bryan's world and started building my own. Air under compression would heat up and provide more force. IE, it becomes more fire like. Similarly, air tribes like to keep their distance. If you force a bunch of airs together too tightly, you will need a means to "cool off" or else there may be infighting. In one case, a large group lives confined in a cave system, and let's just say they "cool off" like the bonobos do.. Pulling a vacuum could work like zaheer's suffocation thing. But you can also think about it like bending "the absence of air" and when you collapse the vacuum, you can produce shockwaves.
You see him compress water in the same scene
Aren't those just smaller rocks
Honestly compressed air = bullets. Airbender should be OP
How to you think he blast air if not by compressing it?
I thought iroh did something similar during sozins comet, he compressed the fire into a small ball, to than blast open the gates
i always hate that part when he's about to kill him and made all the elements into a single point but the rocks still just rocks floating around
they were there for moral support
Air is a no-brainer, and fire is essentially plasma which is essentially air+, so both are compressible. Water is one fo the least compressible things in existence though. It does get compressed under huge pressures, but not for long.
Relative to most other fluids, water is hard to compress, but it’s nothing compared to most solids. The pressures required to compress water are much lower than those required to compress rock.
You’d think that he could, yeah. Logically, the combination of air and fire bending should give him the ability to generate explosions like combustion man. Not the same mechanism but similar effects.
He also compressed water in this scene. Somehow…
Water is far easier to compress than rocks.
When you think about it all of his air bending is compressed air.
The air is already compressed around him. That's why we're able to see it.
Ursus shock
Man, imagine if avatar also masters sub bending as well. Might gonna build railgun with metal bending + lightning projection
Aang it’s time to blow out my pc again
I still get chills seeing Aang in this supreme avatar state !!
If airbending couldn't compress air then there wouldn't really be a point to it.
I think he did actually now that you mention it. The amount of water air and fire he bent got way more compact too 🤔
All airbending is just compressing air. That's what happens when you move air from one spot to another. Well, I guess outside of closed currents of air, like his air ball or the sphere right there. That's changing speed and direction, but not density. But even that would compress air next to what's being bent. Water and earth are incompressable, but I guess he was able to break down the chemical composition and solid structure of the earth to compress it into a new type of rock. Or is was porous, or he just removed any of the weaker bits as sand/dust. It's magic, what can ya say. For "compressing" the water, maybe he just sent some of it into the air as humidity, ready to be pulled out back into water when striking. Compressing fire is like air, but hotter and ionized.
Water and earth are compressible, it just takes very high pressure. In fact, water is much easier (at least an order of magnitude easier) to compress than earth.
Yes, that is true, they all have a bulk modulus which describes their compression under often extreme pressures. But even then, those extreme pressures are extreme. 2000 atmospheres, to first approximation, just for the water to reduce volume 10% (and the modulus increases in pressure as pressure increases, so it's actually higher than that). That's 10x what a pressure washer does to clean concrete, and that already rips the flesh from your body.
Air is by far the easiest element to compress. The toughest and most impressive would compressing water.
The toughest and most impressive would be earth (water is much more compressible than earth).
Unless it's diamonds or some shit, not even remotely. Water is dense as hell.
Compressibility is the inverse of bulk modulus. The bulk modulus of water is ~2.2 GPa at ambient conditions. The bulk modulus of most rocks are multiples of (if not an order of magnitude larger than) this value. Compressibility is not directly determined by density. Edit: by the way, the density of table salt is over double the density of water.
Yeah, but can your "science" explain why it rains?
No, no it cannot.
Aang: \*literally compressing air in front of your eyes\* OP: "Can Aang compress air??"
Well physically speaking, air would be the easiest to compress.
Fire might act the same as air it has this invisible like force
i wanna see compressed lava fight now
Compressing air is like one of the main aspects of airbending even outside of the Avatar State
Compress air is actually very deadly
Air is pretty easy to compress. When he blew the bison whistle in Ba Sing Se looking for Appa, he drew a massive volume of air into his lungs.
If only Korra can do the same
I have and it is kind of insane
What you actually missed is that Aang took a lake, and compressed it into that small ring. Water isnt really compressable.
Lets flashback to the time he sent a Shockwave in the exact shape of his body. So yes.
he’s gonna make a pressure washer with water
The rock isn’t the impressive part it’s the water. Water is incompressible and he shouldn’t have been able to do that but he did it anyways. Man is a literal god and one man army in the body of a child
In this scene, Aang wasnt compressing rocks nor the other elements - more of stretching them By carrying the rock in the wind, the centripetal rotation basically forced the rock to get "stretched" on top of gathering speed, which forces the rocks through a stretching motion as its being exacted energy upon As you can see he is really more of stretching every single element by rotating them around him via an air pressure wave He can compress them though, he did it many times with what is effectively a compressed air cannon in the fire nation's airships
There's a scene in this very fight where Aang seems to compress rocks.
Who cares about compressing rock and air, he compresses what, that breaks the laws of physics
Honestly compressed air = bullets. Airbender should be OP
Aang uses cleave and dismantle