A massive blast shook the port of Beirut , the capital of Lebanon, on Tuesday, significantly damaging several buildings, displacing , people, injuring at least 4,, and killing as of press time. Though many details of the explosion and its aftermath are still developing, Lebanese officials say the blast started with a fire at a warehouse that contained 2, tons of government-seized ammonium nitrate, a chemical used to make fertilizer and bombs. Dramatic footage of the disaster quickly spread on Twitter following the explosion.
Warning: This video contains graphic material. My brother sent me this, we live 10 KM away from the explosion site and the glass of our bldgs got shattered. Lebanon pic. Since the explosion formed a mushroom cloud, many Twitter users questioned whether the blast was a result of an atomic bomb.
And indeed, for most people, images of a mushroom cloud rising over the horizon immediately bring to mind the detonation of a nuke. Get unlimited access to Pop Mech's best-in-class science, tech, and defense content. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said on Twitter "there are literally none of the phenomena one sees with a nuclear explosion.
This isn't that complicated, people. Department of Energy, Newsletter Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital.
David Dearborn, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, responds: "Contrary to a common misconception, the shape of the mushroom cloud does not depend on the nuclear or thermonuclear component; as you note, a massive detonation of chemical explosives would produce the same effect.
The ascending cloud flattens as a result of this resistance, changing it into a mushroom shape. The cloud's edges appear to be constantly curling. This is because of the fluid movement caused by the resistance. The air on the fireball's surface is slowly drawn back, only to roll about and be dragged back into the fireball's core.
This cycle repeats until equilibrium is established. The fireball will continue to rise until it reaches the same density as the surrounding air. This is quite high in the atmosphere in nuclear explosions, usually in the ozone layer. The same report added that an H-fireball bomb's soars to such heights that it collides with the tropopause, the barrier between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
A high-temperature gradient prohibits the two layers of the atmosphere from mixing very well at the tropopause.
The fireball's hot bubble expands and rises at first. The bubble is no longer hot enough to break through the boundary by the time it has climbed from sea level to the tropopause. The fireball flattens out at that moment; it can no longer extend vertically, expanding to the side into a mushroom top.
Mushroom clouds can reach heights of tens of thousands of feet in minutes, OSTI. Most passenger flights fly at the height of roughly 33, feet or 10, meters. Let's take a look back at what transpired after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in The mushroom cloud ascended to more than 60, feet, or nearly 20, meters, in less than 10 minutes. However, this does not provide us with the complete picture. The cloud had risen to the cruise altitude of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb, in less than 30 seconds, despite being more than 20, meters high in the first 10 minutes.
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