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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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athousanderrors) on Oct 31, 2019 at 4:57pm PDT
