alt Hacker NewsNot that it really matters, but the article also refers to it as “drawing water to the top”. That seems more representative of reality than “pumping water from the bottom”.
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margalabargala • yesterday at 11:31 PM
Yeah it's the difference between creating low vs high pressure.
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If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.
This is why the question is interesting. You can't just suck water to the top of a 60 meter tree. There must be some kind of positive-pressure pumping involved.