Diver Cracks Open An Egg Underwater — No One Was Ready For What Happens to the Yolk

For humans, it is just a hunk of omelette or a slice of frittata, but encapsulated within an egg is a wonderhouse where nature works its magic. When a rooster mates with a hen by doing a “cloacal kiss,” the egg inside the hen’s oviduct gets fertilized. Slowly by slowly, the egg yolk gets enfolded in a hard, crusty calcium carbonate shell that is supposed to offer protection against harmful bacteria and prevent dehydration. Without this guarding shell, the egg yolk cannot survive for long. But a video, lately doing rounds on the internet, has put a question mark on billions of years of evolutionary process. The video shared by the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (@BIOSStation) shows a diver trying to crack an egg underwater. 

Titled "The Egg," this video was a part of the 2011 BIOS Explorer program's "Water Moves" series, according to the YouTube description. BIOS Dive Safety Officer Alex Hunter and filmmaker Dean Lee were involved in its filming. The 58-second footage, which has attracted nearly 10 million views, shows a diver submerged inside turquoise water. He flashes an egg on the screen, then whips out a small blade and starts tapping the white shell gently. As the shell cracks, he pulls the two shell halves apart as if extracting a pearl from an oyster.

From between the pulling shell crusts appears a squishy yolk and its transparent albumen, floating and wobbling like a rare lemon, a lime green orb, and a bulbous molecule of lava drifting without gravity. At the end of the video, the diver swims closer to the floating yolk and claps his hands to squash it. A trail of chalky white plumes explodes in the water. As it turns out, there’s a foolproof science behind this phenomenon. 

“When you break an egg in a glass of water, the yolk spreads everywhere," Hunter explained to HuffPost. "When you are down in the ocean, the pressure holds it together. It is fascinating.” In the comments section of the video, people imagined bizarre scenarios about this hard-hitting science. ”Feels like a jellyfish just swallowed a tennis ball or an embryo,” commented @onjongtaengsone2868. @shaunthorsted7293 said, “I kept waiting for a fish to come flying by and snatching it.” @isaberry1602 wrote, “This is amazing, so magical!”

This is not the first time a diver has attempted to crack an egg underwater. In another video, a man named Ben Keough from Go Dive Brisbane dived nearly 100 feet under water and showed how an egg stays together at depth. Not long after the egg’s yolk was released from the whites, it was swallowed by a hungry fish that had been swimming nearby.

Photographer and scuba diver Ian Haggerty (@ian_haggerty_photography_) also dived 30-feet deep to do the crack an egg experiment. In a March 2023 video, he appears to be tapping the brown shell of an egg with a blade. After some struggle, the shell finally breaks and a tiny lemon-looking yolk swishes out. Like some spherical version of a yellow jellyfish, the gloopy little mass keeps on floating softly while Haggerty keeps on encircling it with his fingers. Unlike Keough’s case, this time, no fish dashed in to photobomb the baby yolk.