Posted
on February 24, 2014
Chunks
of ice were just floating down the St. Lawrence River, minding their
own business, when suddenly they found themselves in a narrowed
stretch of the river, where they stuck, caught in a huge traffic jam.
Well,
I guess I should call it an ice jam!
Around
250,000 tons of ice were jammed up, blocking the St. Lawrence River.
And
the St. Lawrence is really important—that is the way that ships get
from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, and vice versa. The ice
jam had to go!
Someone
decided to try using explosives to clear the jam. Thermite (the kind
known as a magnesium bomb) is an explosive made of finely divided
magnesium and iron oxide, and three 90-pound charges were readied.
Ka-boom
went the first charge! When the second charge was fired, “a huge flame fifteen feet in diameter and six feet high was emitted.”
Apparently this was startling even to the guys blowing up the
thermite; people talked about watching “burning ice.” After the
third charge, the whole jam moved out and “passed quietly down the
river.”
Do
you like fireworks?
Some
of the brightest parts of fireworks are created by burning magnesium.
Magnesium is a metallic element that scientists sometimes work with
in powder or ribbon form. When people burn magnesium in a lab, for
example as a demonstration for students, it is important that the
demonstrator wear goggles and that the students not look directly at
the burning magnesium.
Check out this video to see how
brightly it burns!
Here
is a video of a demonstration of burning magnesium inside dry ice.
If
you have ever wanted to see thermite destroying a laptop, here
it is. In slow motion. (Note that this sort of thermite uses aluminum
rather than magnesium.)
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