athousanderrors: from 'Spirited Away' - soot sprites, clutching confetti stars, running about excitedly. (Default)
athousanderrors ([personal profile] athousanderrors) wrote2019-11-01 01:22 pm
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As close as you will ever be to a nuclear explosion

THIS IS FUCKING TERRIFYING

No thank you.

The columns of smoke in the foreground are telephone poles boiling

This is way cooler to look at than it should be

Science side of Tumblr would like to add:

Heat is generally transmitted in 3 forms: conduction, convection, radiation.

The fact that the telephone poles and wires are boiling away well before the shockwave hits them indicates that the heat from the explosion has not reached them by convection (much slower than the speed of sound) or by conduction (at best, comparable to the speed of sound), but purely by radiation. In other words: the explosion is bright enough to boil everything.

That’s exactly the case. Specifically, it’s the creosote burning off; you can see the smoke blown away when the shock wave arrives.

As a matter of fact, when you take a high-speed photo of the initial phase of the explosion, before it has even reached the ground from the test tower, you see these bright ground-facing spikes:

Those spikes, known as rope tricks, are from the photons (x-rays, gamma rays, visible light, infrared, the whole shebang) themselves burning away the guy wires that were holding the tower up.
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