| Millipascals (mPa) | Gigapascals (GPa) |
|---|---|
| 1 Millipascal | 1 × 10-12 GPa |
| 2 Millipascals | 2 × 10-12 GPa |
| 3 Millipascals | 3 × 10-12 GPa |
| 4 Millipascals | 4 × 10-12 GPa |
| 5 Millipascals | 5 × 10-12 GPa |
| 10 Millipascals | 1 × 10-11 GPa |
| 20 Millipascals | 2 × 10-11 GPa |
| 25 Millipascals | 2.5 × 10-11 GPa |
| 50 Millipascals | 5 × 10-11 GPa |
| 100 Millipascals | 1 × 10-10 GPa |
| Reference | Millipascals (mPa) | Gigapascals (GPa) |
|---|---|---|
| Atmospheric pressure at sea level | 101325000 mPa | 0.000101325 GPa |
| Healthy blood pressure (120 mmHg) | 16000000 mPa | 0.000016 GPa |
| A car tyre | 220000000 mPa | 0.00022 GPa |
| A racing bicycle tyre | 600000000 mPa | 0.0006 GPa |
The millipascal is a unit of pressure equal to one thousandth of a pascal. Its symbol is mPa. The pascal is already a very small unit — it is the pressure of a sheet of paper lying on a table — so a thousandth of one is smaller than almost any pressure a person encounters. It survives because two fields genuinely work at that scale: acoustics and viscosity.
Sound is a pressure wave, and the pressures involved are tiny. Ordinary conversation at a metre carries a sound pressure of about 20 millipascals. A whisper is nearer 2, and the threshold of hearing, the quietest sound a healthy young ear can detect, is 0.02 millipascals, which is 20 micropascals. A loud rock concert reaches a few pascals. The entire useful range of human hearing therefore lives between a hundredth of a millipascal and a few thousand of them.
That is why sound is reported in decibels rather than in pressure units. A range spanning a factor of a million is unwieldy in linear numbers, so acoustics takes the logarithm and anchors it at the threshold of hearing. But the decibel is not a unit of pressure at all: behind every decibel figure is a pressure in pascals or millipascals, and instrument calibration is done in those real units.
The second use is stranger, because it is not a pressure at all. Dynamic viscosity is measured in pascal seconds, and almost every liquid people care about lands in the millipascal second range. Water at room temperature is 1 mPa·s exactly enough for practical purposes. That happens to equal one centipoise in the older CGS system, so the switch to SI left every viscosity table numerically unchanged, which is why the millipascal second took hold where the millipascal alone did not.
With that scale in hand, the numbers become legible. Petrol is about 0.6 mPa·s, olive oil about 80, honey several thousand, and glycerol around 1,400. Blood plasma is about 1.3, and whole blood nearer 4, which is one reason blood flow is harder to model than water flow.
For pressure itself, outside acoustics, the millipascal appears in vacuum work and in the gentlest of laboratory measurements — the pressure differences that drive slow gas flow, or the residual pressure in a chamber that has been pumped down hard. In those settings the alternative units are the micropascal below and the pascal above.
One millipascal equals 0.001 pascals, one thousand micropascals, 0.00001 millibars, or about 0.000000145 pounds per square inch.
The gigapascal is a unit of pressure equal to a billion pascals, written GPa. It is a thousand megapascals and ten thousand bar. It is the unit in which materials science states stiffness rather than strength, and in which the pressures inside planets and inside high-pressure laboratories are described.
Elastic modulus is its principal use. Steel has a Young's modulus of about 200 gigapascals, copper 117, aluminium 70, ordinary glass 70, concrete around 30, timber along the grain 10 to 15, and rubber less than a tenth of one. Those numbers describe how much a material stretches under load, not when it breaks, and they explain why a steel beam of the same strength as an aluminium one still deflects less.
Diamond marks the top of the ordinary scale. Its modulus of roughly 1200 gigapascals is the highest of any natural material, which is why it is used to make anvils for high-pressure work: nothing else can push that hard without deforming first. Synthetic diamond is made industrially at about five gigapascals and high temperature, in presses built specifically to hold that pressure.
The interior of the earth is described in the same unit. Pressure at the base of the crust is around one gigapascal, at the boundary between mantle and core about 136, and at the centre of the planet roughly 360. Laboratory diamond anvil cells now reach and exceed the central value, which allows the behaviour of iron and silicates under planetary conditions to be studied directly rather than inferred.
For contrast, the deepest point in the ocean exerts only about 0.11 gigapascals. That comparison is worth keeping, because it shows how much larger geological pressures are than anything associated with water: the bottom of the Mariana Trench is a thousandth of the pressure at the centre of the earth.
Below the gigapascal, the megapascal describes strength, and above it there is little except stellar and theoretical physics. The terapascal appears mainly in the elastic modulus of carbon nanotubes and in the interiors of giant planets, so the gigapascal is effectively the top of the range that laboratories and engineers work in.
One gigapascal equals 1,000,000,000 pascals, 1000 megapascals, 10,000 bar, or about 145,000 pounds per square inch.