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by throwawaylinux
1659 days ago
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> "People who think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a restless volcano up close. They are a whole lot bigger than they seem to be in the films. Mount St Helens is a relatively small volcano, yet it still took me nearly 6 hours to walk out of the center crater." Maybe volcanologists who don't think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a peeved hydrogen bomb up close. https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2000/fs036-00/ USGS estimated the blast from Mt. St. Helens was 7 megatons and 17 megatons of other thermal energy released (I guess most of that is magma flowing out). The early large fusion bombs are comparable to that, actually bigger. The largest one ever tested was 50 megatons and had a design capable of 100 megatons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtCTzbh4mNQ. |
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Well, at minimum, that's still between 400 and 700 times the energy released during the Hiroshima explosion. That's over two magnitudes more energy and I'm glad I wasn't anywhere near it at the time. ;-)
The Tsar Bomba (which I remember as a kid) had to be made to prove a point but as Kurchatov, Sakharov etc. seemed to realize at the time, making the 100 megaton bomb wouldn't add much to the argument (presumably other than additional cost). There was no point making a bigger bomb as the additional energy essentially would have been blown out into space thus not substantially increasing the blast area.
Anyway, that's not the point which is that even on piddling little earth nature has ways of producing huge amounts of destructive energy. As for supernovas, etc. except by way of mathematical calculations, I don't think the average human can actually contemplate or imagine energy on such a scale.