How to properly fall into water from great height

[Klaus]

The problem isn't surface tension. The problem is hydraulics and viscosity. Water doesn't compress - so it functions as a surface with zero elasticity. If you're lowering yourself slowly into water, there's no problem, since it will flow around you. But if you're just hitting it square on at terminal velocity, you're toast. Throwing something ahead of you would not save you.

At least, not according to Mythbusters. It might help a little bit, so you might as well do it, but at terminal velocity, it's the difference between splat and splat.

-Jester

Well, it's a matter of scale, I think. If you had a sufficiently large object (say, a boulder) to fall behind, it would leave a cavitated space behind it where the water would be "softer" (since it's at least partly made up of air bubbles). A smaller object (like a hammer, which Mythbusters used) just doesn't have enough of an effect. Whether the bubble content of the water can be made high enough to help seems iffy - and of course, if the object is too large, you end up going splat into the back of the rock instead of the water. :)

So, if you have a boulder to push out in front of you, I figure it's worth a shot, but I wouldn't expect too much.