Made of Explodium in real life.
- Pure elemental fluorine is among the most reactive (unstable) substances known to man. Its entry in the lab safety section of the CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry, note simply reads as follows:(Chemical name:Things that substance reacts violently with)Fluorine: Everything
- Anything elemental fluorine touches, other than an already fluorinated compound like Teflon, bursts into flame as it strips electrons from more stable atoms. This includes things like glass, air, metal, and, in the right conditions, the non-reactive noble gases. The pain goes double if you are dumb enough to put it with sodium or other alkali metals (for example, with cesium
...). - Chlorine trifluoride takes everything elemental fluorine does and turns it up to eleven. Chlorine trifluoride reacts explosively with water, sand, glass, and carbon dioxide, and asbestos — it burns things that one would consider already burned. A spill of it will start a fire that can only be extinguished by pumping the surrounding air with noble gases, or simply letting it burn itself out. There was a one-ton spill of it in a factory... it burned through 1 foot of concrete and then 3 feet of gravel underneath. And the byproducts of its chemical reactions are really nasty things like hydrofluoric acid (it burns flesh on contact with the wonderful addition of leeching calcium from your bones for calcium poisoning if it gets absorbed). And unlike elemental fluorine, chlorine trifluoride WILL react with Teflon, explosively. One chemist said that the only way to deal with a chlorine trifluoride fire is a good pair of running shoes. Ever seen a brick burst into flames and explode before? Now you have. It was once considered as a source of rocket fuel, but was deemed way too volatile, with the interviewee - John Drury Clark - giving the "running shoes" soundbite.John Drury Clark: It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water— with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. — because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
- Someone discovered another variant in Chlorine pentafluoride, which is at least as volatile if not moreso.
- Dioxygen difluoride. Even when freezing at -183°C, it still blows up. Just a few molecules of it put together with some sulfur can let out enough energy to rival your breakfast. It's been given the humorous nickname "FOOF" (a pun on its chemical composition) due to its reactivity.
- Many perchlorates detonate readily. The most alarming is fluorine perchlorate, whose formula can be ClO4F or FClO4. This is a very explosive gas at standard temperature and pressure, and when the (cold) liquid form starts to freeze, KABOOM!*
- Anything elemental fluorine touches, other than an already fluorinated compound like Teflon, bursts into flame as it strips electrons from more stable atoms. This includes things like glass, air, metal, and, in the right conditions, the non-reactive noble gases. The pain goes double if you are dumb enough to put it with sodium or other alkali metals (for example, with cesium
- The Hindenburg famously exploded due to using hydrogen for lift. It had been designed for the inert helium, but the United States refused to sell it to the German government owned airship out of fear of a repeat of early WWI, when zeppelins rained destruction on cities, not one being shot down for the first few years until the invention of the incendiary bullet. The Germans basically shrugged and filled it with hydrogen instead. They had a perfect safety record for four decades (since the aircraft had been invented) using hydrogen, which they viewed as being similar to how we see gasoline in automobiles: potentially dangerous, but with careful control, harmless. In 1937, they were proven fatally wrong. Amazingly, 2/3 of the people on board survived the massive explosion.
- The Hindenburg conflagration (technically not an explosion) was caused by static discharge igniting the doping (paint) on its outer skin. At least one NASA scientist claimed that the vast majority of the hydrogen contained in its gas bags simply escaped into the upper atmosphere without burning, and claimed the main blame lay with the doping, which contained significant amounts of aluminum powder and iron oxide, which can, in the correct proportions, form thermite. Tests by the MythBusters indicated that it was actually a combination of these two theories: The doping was responsible for the brightness of the flames (and, contrary to a major argument put forth by detractors of the incendiary paint theory, actually did cause some minor thermite reactions), while hydrogen was the main cause of the speed and severity of the burn. So, really, it was doubly Made of Explodium (well, Made of Incendium, but you get the idea).
- The Hindenburg conflagration (technically not an explosion) was caused by static discharge igniting the doping (paint) on its outer skin. At least one NASA scientist claimed that the vast majority of the hydrogen contained in its gas bags simply escaped into the upper atmosphere without burning, and claimed the main blame lay with the doping, which contained significant amounts of aluminum powder and iron oxide, which can, in the correct proportions, form thermite.
- Explosive Reactive Armour is one of the few Real Life examples where being made of explodium is an intentional design feature. ERA works by coating a tank's exposed surfaces with carefully designed explosive bricks. When hit by an anti-tank round making use of explosively-formed plasma, the ERA brick detonates, "reacting" with an explosion of its own that disrupts the plasma jet, neutralizing the attack. Because the tank's armor is thick enough to resist the unfocused outward blast of the ERA brick, the tank is left mostly unharmed, despite lots of shock and awe. One counter to ERA is a Tandem-charge, a projectile that explodes twice—the first explosion forces the ERA to denotate; the second explosion damages the tank.
- Nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors...really any installations handling nuclear fuels. Basically, in any scenario where the mass of fissionable material goes above its prompt critical mass (critical mass is dangerous but is necessary for commercial nuclear reactors to provide any usable energy at all) and you don't control it or do anything to stop it, it's all over. Though they tend to melt more than explode (save for bombs and major screw-ups like Chernobyl - see "don't control it or do anything to stop it"), they still qualify for this trope.
- NOT nuclear fusion, however, contrary to what fiction would have you believe. You need to force nuclear fusion to happen (stars have the benefit of their immense mass and gravity to do it for them), and any interruption just makes it shut down. In fact, nuclear fusion bombs only work by first detonating another nuclear fission device to generate the extreme pressures needed to force it to happen.
- Under very specific conditions, however, nuclear fusion is explosive. Consider a Sun-like star, that has exhausted its central hydrogen and contains an inert core composed of helium. This core compresses and gets hotter until helium fusion starts. However, since the core is so dense (what astronomers know as "degenerate", as it's composed of degenerate matter) it cannot expand to counter the excess energy produced by helium burningnote , a runaway fusion process called a helium flash begins, and in which, during the few seconds it lasts, produces as much energy as an entire galaxy, ending when the core re-expands, cools down, and fuses helium stably.note A similar process, the so-called carbon detonation, as it involves carbon instead of helium, occurs in a type of supernova. In that case, the entire star goes boom, shining as much as an entire galaxy too.
- Stars massive enough to fuse carbon can experience such "carbon flash" too. However, as per the helium flash above, is generally thought the weight of the star's outer layers absorb the explosion and is all energy goes to re-expand the stellar core. However, theoretical research suggests in some cases the starting of such late burning processes on them can be powerful enough to eject the star's outer envelope, producing a sort of pre-supernova, or at the very least to produce outbursts, temporarily increasing the luminosity and mass loss of the star. Don't mess with degenerate matter.
- The largest stars have enough mass/gravity to prevent this for a while longer. It will burn through elements, fusing them into larger and larger elements. Then it hits iron, at which point all nuclear fusion stops dead. Then comes the supernova. To conclude this assortment of explosive events, one final caveat which affects the entire universe, including us here on Earth, comes from these gigantic blasts; in the incredible heat of the supernova, elements heavier than iron can be generated through fusion. Not only does this create elements such as gold and uranium, but also a whole host of lighter-than-iron elements are also expelled by the blast and into space, including those vital to life. Red giants also release these lighter elements when casting off their outer layers, enriching the universe with material that eventually may become part of a new star, a new planet, or maybe, just maybe, a new living thing - the adage of "you are made of stardust" is true, after all! Every organism that is alive, as well as every organism that came before it, owes its existence to the material ejected by expanding and exploding stars, and as the Stelliferous era is here to stay for a very, very long time, this will be the case for almost the entirety of the forseeable future.
- Last but not least, novae, produced when a white dwarf star accretes hydrogen (or much more rarely helium) from a nearby companion star until it's compressed and heated enough to start a runaway nuclear fusion, producing an explosion as luminous as a very luminous star and that can be repeated as long as there's matter being fed into the white dwarf.
- As a general rule, almost any chemical that contains a large percentage of nitrogen by weight. Nitrogen gas is extremely stable, so nitrogen compounds have a nasty habit of reverting to gas given the slightest opportunity. This results in a rapidly-expanding ball of hot gas, which is, well, basically what an explosion is. Show a chemist a compound with a long chain of nitrogen atoms, and they'll probably be cowering behind a blast shield as fast as possible.note A few examples:
- There are entire families of chemicals that are so unstable they cannot be synthesized without blowing up the test apparatus. Or they blow up soon after they're synthesized. When the procedure recommends using Teflon and stainless steel apparatus to minimize shrapnel — that's Explodium.
- Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane aka CL-20. Because regular Nitro wasn't 'splody enough. Even more hilarious, a 1-to-1 mixture with of this stuff with TNT is more stable than the pure CL-20. Yes, an explosive that gets more stable when mixed with another explosive.
- N-amino azidotetrazole is already explodium by itself, but some of the derivatives are even worse. One of them, which isn't named, is explosive enough to go off when trying to get an infrared spectrum of it. In layman's terms, an infrared light shining on it sets it off. One YouTube video even cheerfully says that azidoazide azide (C2N14) can explode by itself. To put it in perspective, most things mentioned in this part of the page have been made in large amounts and even have some use. These compounds don't even have that luxury.note
- Not for nothing are the various aggresively packed nitrogen-oxygen groups often refered to as "Oh Nos" by chemists. Ten nitrogen and six double-bonded oxygen, all forced to coexist as a single molecule. For the record, it ceases being a single molecule and loudly decomposes into a cloud of various atoms within a few minutes of sitting on its own.
- Ammonium nitrate is an extremely useful fertilizer that completely falls into this, especially since agriculture on an industrial scale requires significant amounts of it to be stored and shipped in bulk, and if safety regulations are lax or non-existent, incidents occur. In 1947, a recommissioned Liberty Ship carrying 2300 tons of ammonium nitrate happened to be moored next to another freighter hauling 1800 tons of sulfur in Texas City, Texas, USA, along with assorted sundry goods like munitions. As far as anyone can tell, the fertilizer somehow ignited in the hold of the first ship, generating an explosion felt in Louisiana, the next state over. Look at AZF below, and remember that that was a mild explosion compared to its historical predecessors.
- BASF, a chemical company, ran an ammonium nitrate manufacturing plant in Oppau, a small suburb of Ludwigshafen, Germany, during World War I and a few years after. As the explosive qualities of the fertilizer were unknown, they used dynamite to loosen it whenever it would clump up in the storage silos. Somehow, nothing untoward happened for over a decade. Then, one day in 1921, one of these routine blastings went horribly wrong and the plant was simply... erased, taking about 80% of the town and at least 500 lives with it.
- On 4 August 2020, a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in the capital city of Lebanon exploded, causing at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and US$15 billion in property damage, as well as leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. A cargo of 2,750 tonnes of the substance (equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT) had been stored in a warehouse alongside fireworks for the previous six years after having been confiscated by the Lebanese authorities from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus. The materials had grown unstable with age and had also begun to leak from their storage bags as they decomposed. Then, a fire in the same warehouse set the whole stockpile off. The blast was so powerful that it physically shook the whole country of Lebanon, was felt in Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Israel, as well as parts of Europe, and was heard in Cyprus, more than 240 km (150 mi) away. It was detected by the United States Geological Survey as a seismic event of magnitude 3.3 and is considered one of the most powerful accidental artificial non-nuclear explosions in history.
- Another ammonium nitrate plant: AZF. Then taken up to eleven in Korea, with a train full of the same fertilizer colliding with a train full of fuel, essentially synthesising an explosive by accident.
- There are entire families of chemicals that are so unstable they cannot be synthesized without blowing up the test apparatus.
- West Fertilizer Plant destroyed much of the surrounding city of West, Texas in 2013 after ammonium nitrate exploded. The fire and subsequent explosion were caused by arson.
- Ammonium nitrate has been used in terrorist bombs like the one built by Timothy McVeigh to perpetrate the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19th 1995. McVeigh was able to purchase more than 2000 pounds of the fertilizer without arousing any suspicion.
- In 2015, the Chinese port at Tianjin stored a number of hazardous materials that exploded with enough force to register as a 2.3 magnitude earthquake, toss shipping containers like fireworks, kill 173 people and injure almost 800 others over the course of a nightmarish weekend. Making things worse, the firefighters' attempts to control the flames with water exacerbated the problem and helped cause eight additional explosions due to chemical chain reactions with some of the combustible materials on-site. The primary suspects? 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, 500 tonnes of potassium nitrate, (at least 700 tonnes of) sodium cyanide, calcium carbide (which reacts to water by turning into acetylene gas), and an overheated container of dry nitrocellulose to set it all off.
- Finally, every contact explosive, starting with nitroglycerin and ending with nitrogen triiodide. NI3 has been known to explode when exposed to radiation. That's right, a contact explosive so sensitive that bits of atoms hitting it will set it off. Curiously, NI3 is only explosive when dry. As it's made using a wet chemical process (that is, one involving being dissolved in water), making it is perfectly safe, and leaves you with a solution you can paint on a surface and allow to dry to a thin layer of explosive that will detonate on contact (but not be thick enough to carry the explosion past the points of contact or produce enough force to be dangerous, if you do it properly). There are reports that painting various surfaces in bathrooms (such as the floor, or toilet seats) with this went through a phase of being a popular prank in at least one teacher's college.
- Phosphorous is pyrophoric, meaning it will spontaneously combust when left exposed to air. The original method of producing it, which involved boiling down hundreds of litres of urine, has the minor drawback that at some point, the apparatus - by this point liberally coated internally with phosphorous - would inevitably go dry, resulting in a fierce fire that a) cannot be easily extinguished with water as it will re-ignite again when it dries out, b) is sticky while burning due to its waxy texture and low melting point, and c) can easily turn into an explosive disassembly of the rig. Modern extraction methods take a significantly less potentially dramatic route. Oh, and did we mention that white phosphorous is also alarmingly poisonous, and that Phosphorus poisoning can cause necrosis of the bones, known as "Phossy Jaw", and potentially something called "Smoking Stool Syndrome"? And that and it's one of the (many) potential chemical hazards found in Meth Labs? And that it's banned as a chemical weapon and heavily controlled as a drug percursor pretty much everywhere? Oh, and also, that it's a vital ingredient in artificial fertilizers, without which feeding everyone on Earth gets problematic?
- Take a look at the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.
- Acetone peroxidenote , also known as "Mother of Satan", is a staple of back-alley chemists and would-be terrorists worldwide for being relatively easy to synthesizenote . It is notable in that it is the only remotely practical high explosive that does not contain nitrogen in any way, shape or form (and thus is undetectable for sniffer dogs and bomb detectors which are attuned to the smell of nitrogen compounds). It is also notable for being extremely touchy and unpredictable, especially when made by a typical back-alley chemist from impure ingredients. Most explosives become less sensitive when wet, but TATP tends to sublime and condense into completely dry crystals on an inconvenient surface, that could explode at any moment.
- Eucalyptus Trees. They're filled with highly-flammable oil, and can literally EXPLODE in bushfires. In the Land Downunder, even the trees can kill you. Of course, if it's a tree that gets you, you've been lucky. Plus, with the ability of several eucalyptus trees to shed dead branches, they don't even need to be made out of explodium to kill you.
- Sandbox Trees (among other plants) use a form of seed dispersal known as explosive dehiscence, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They can propel seeds ~300 ft/100 meters (roughly 88-89 meters) away, and presumably in uncomfortable ways into any poor sucker standing nearby when one goes off. Yes, there's a reason the tree is nicknamed the dynamite tree.
- If it burns and you can mix it with air, it can explode. This includes pretty much any kind of organic dust.note Therefore mills of all kinds, especially the old-timey ones that use stones, are made of explodium. Grain elevators explode for this reason also. It has been suggested this very phenomenon was the cause of the Great Fire of London in 1666, in which it is estimated 700,000 out of the population of 800,000 lost their homes.
- Submitted for your consideration — next time you put a spoonful of sugar on your cereal, remember this story. The resulting fire melted 3 silos full of sugar into sugar magma that didn't solidify for weeks.
- It wasn't a torpedo that blew the Lusitania, that "just" shook up the coal dust in the bunkers. It was a sparking wire that actually set the whole lot off. Combined with fifteen thousand rounds of .303 ammunition, of course.
- Pistachio nuts are susceptible to spontaneous combustion and explosion when stored in large quantities and are classed as "explosive" materials under various cargo transportation guidelines.
- Even metal can explode in dust form. Aluminium dust is notorious for this, but any fine powder of a metal that can oxidise in air can ignite with a small spark, such as built-up static electricity from friction.
- Submitted for your consideration — next time you put a spoonful of sugar on your cereal, remember this story.
- Oil wells and coal mines may not explode, but they won't stop burning if set aflame. The Centralia coal mine has been on fire since 1962, and will keep going at least another 200 years.
- Under the right circumstances, a coal mine can catch fire THEN explode. Without proper ventilation, methane gas can build up. Under exactly the right conditions, it can explode like a fuel-air bomb, but this is rare. More common is a layer of burnable concentration forming, and a sheet of flame ripping through the mine if it's touched off. That's bad, but the horror comes if it hits a pocket of coal dust that's just right to go off in a dust explosion. This is why coal mines that aren't properly maintained are death traps. On the other hand, with proper ventilation, mining practices, maintenance, and protective equipment, coal mining is a quite safe occupation.
- The Kuwaiti oil wells that Saddam ordered to be set alight would have allegedly burned for a hundred years if not extinguished (Jump to 4:30 in the video).
- The so-called Door to Hell in Darvaza, Turkmenistan, which has been burning since the 1970s.
- There's a coal fire in Germany that has been burning since 1688.
- The Smoking Hills in Canada consist of oil shales which spontaneously ignited centuries ago without human involvement and have been burning since.
- Australia's Burning Mountain has been burning for over ~6000 years.
- Alkali metals in general are well-known for their explosive tendenciesnote . Sodium, when placed in water, will react to form hydrogen gas, which then catches fire from the heat of the reaction. Potassium explodes even more spectacularly, but while the elements further down the same column of the periodic table are more reactive still, they're so heavy you need a much larger sample to get the same volume of gas. Potassium can be Explodium even without being exposed to water, forming shock-sensitive peroxides on the metal's surface if it's stored for long in anything other than clean vacuum or argon.
Cesium is especially dangerous, as it will explode immediately upon contact with water with enough force to shatter a glass vessel, and will spontaneously ignite in air. Francium has a half-life of 22 minutes, meaning that if a significant mass of it existed, it would vaporize itself from the sheer amount of radiation and would probably continue doing so even after decaying into something else note . Fortunately, it's extremely rare, with only a few million isolated atoms on Earth.- Just about any first semester chemistry student will have tried what happens when dropping sodium onto water. The only reason for the low mortality of first semester chemistry students is that standard first semester sodium consists largely of sodium oxides and hydroxides (some peroxides too if you're unlucky), and thus is comparably tame, just swimming on the water and happily bubbling off explosive but rapidly diluting hydrogen gas, much to the disappointment of the above-mentioned suicidal student. So Do Not Try This at Home, and especially not with the analysis-grade material of your professor!
- Imagine a factory that makes rocket fuel. Imagine the entire facility coated in highly unstable, incredibly dangerous powdered fuel due to lax safety protocols. Imagine this facility also stockpiling said rocket fuel from floor to ceiling. And then imagine somebody firing up a blowtorch in this same facility. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the PEPCON Disaster!
- For the record, the material that exploded in the PEPCON disaster was ammonium perchlorate, and it had accumulated that much because it was the oxidizer in the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, and the Space Shuttle Program at that time was on a lengthy hiatus thanks to the Challenger Explosion.
- Hypergolic fuels. Hypergolic fuels are two-component fuels which ignite from merely being mixed together. Usually one is a strong reductant and the other a strong oxidizer. The asset of hypergolic fuel is that it is air-independent and does not need external supply of oxygen. Such engines also don't need seperate igniters, making them more reliable, especially for maneuvering thrusters which have to fire repeatedly, and with perfect timing. The downside? Well... there are things better left untold. Perhaps the most famous engine using hypergolic fuels was the WWII German Walter turbine, which used T-stoff (hydrogen peroxide and methanol) as oxidizer and C-stoff (methyl hydrazine and potassium permanganate) as reductant.
- Many airplanes have had reputation of flying coffin. Messerschmitt 163 Komet was a flying crematorium. It employed the Walter turbine, and it was prone to explode violently even on the slightest hit. Even landing with any fuel on tanks could lead into an explosion as the shock could mix the fuel residues with ensuing explosion.
- Type XVII and XVIII U-boats were basically Me 163 Komet under the sea! They were the world's first air-independent submarines. Unfortunately, they were Awesome, but Impractical: their fuel cost thousandfold the same as diesel oil would cost, and one single hand grenade, not to speak about depth charges, would have wreaked havoc if exploded in the vicinity. Even the Kriegsmarine had enough sense not to introduce the Walter submarines to service. The Royal Navy built two Walter submarines after the WWII, HMS Explorer and HMS Excalibur. They gained nicknames Exploder and Excruciator amongst the crews. Fortunately the invention of nuclear submarine resolved the question of air-independent submarines.
- Rockets as such, because they store enough energy in their humongous fuel tanks to rival small nuclear bombs. Once an N1 rocket exploded on the launch pad because of a loose bolt that entered a fuel pump note . The result? The eighth largest non-nuclear man made explosion in human history.
- So large in fact, that the US was able to determine that it was a moon rocket based on spy satellite pictures alone because the surrounding destruction was much too great for a LEO vehicle. NASA had a three mile exclusion zone around Apollo launch complexes because of such destructive capability.
- See the video from SpaceX: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster. A particularly cool looking explosion follows the failure of a test booster's hydraulic systems to lower the legs, resulting in the rocket slamming into the deck of the landing platform and exploding spectacularly, hurling the GoPro camera across the platform effortlessly."Yes, yes... you tipped over, again... but DO you have to EXPLODE each time you do?!!".
- Before decent paint became cheap, it was common to coat ships in pitch. Keep in mind that said ships were made of wood. And since many of them carried cannons, that meant they had gunpowder onboard. Be careful with that match! For this reason, careful measures were taken to ensure that this didn't go off, like no fire whatsoever in the Powder-Room, all light came through a window from the next chamber, and the powder-room itself was below water-level.
- Cracked has done a couple:
- Things That Shouldn't Explode But Did Anyway lists things that seemingly were made of explodium at some point, even an office chair!
- Photoplasty advertises lots of explosive things in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
- Things That Shouldn't Explode But Did Anyway
- This beetle literaly farts out an explosive rocket fuel.
- Early examples of the Russian BMD-series (Infantry Fighting Vehicles designed to be dropped out of planes) had magnesium armor in order to save weight. This was abandoned after it was discovered that the vehicles had a tendency to catch fire when hit by RPGs. Both the BMP-1 and -2 also have fuel tanks mounted on the rear hatch, although that's not as bad as it sounds because they're a) on top of the armour plating and b) full of relatively non-flammable diesel. Nevertheless, modern successor vehicles lack this particular design feature.
- The very air was made of explodium in the New London, Texas school explosion.
- It is theorized that magnetic monopoles may cause the catalysis of baryon decay. That means if you pass a monopole through a normal atom the atom will decay into a burst of gamma rays and neutrinos. Worse, the monopole is a catalyst which means that it isn't consumed in the reaction and will go on to cause all the other atoms it meets to decay. Physicists seem to be quite sure that they exist.
- The Halifax Explosion of 1917. It was caused when a passenger ship (the Imo) hit a ship carrying thousands of pounds of explosives. The accident caused a fire on board, and the crew exited Dodge as fast as possible, leaving the ship to drift against the docks. While it was there, the fire reached the cargo, and then everything exploded. The yield is estimated to have been 2.9 kt, rivalling a small tactical nuclear weapon and making it the largest non-nuclear manmade explosion in history.
- A whale once exploded in Taiwan from gases building up during decomposition.
- Praya dubia will explode if brought above a certain water pressure, due to their bodies being internally pressurized to survive the abyssal depths.
- While, strictly speaking, we aren't talking about combustion here, any piece of machinery that involves a compressed air or steam boiler can produce a hell of a bang if it is operated improperly. MythBusters demonstrated what happens when a water heater explodes — now imagine that scaled up to the size of a maritime, commercial, or locomotive boiler.
- This type of "explosion" (it's technically not a proper explosion but that's splitting hairs) is called a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion) or SSEVE (Sublimating Solid Expanding Vapour Explosion).
- The xenon arc lamps in a movie theatre projector are so highly pressurized that they shatter with explosive force (especially the ones at IMAX theatres where the person changing the bulb actually wears body armor), not to mention they are made of a material that is weakened by the oils on human skin.note They often fail catastrophically (BOOM!) instead of simply burning out, often times destroying the lamphouse. One story on the film tech forum tells how the electrode was embedded into the wall on the other side of the projector booth after one such incident.
- On movie sets, you're told to handle the tungsten lights with a lot of care and caution for two reasons: Heat, and that tungsten bulbs can explode, especially if (like xenon arc lamps) they come in contact with the oils on human skin. They're frequently covered with mesh screens to help minimize the shrapnel.
- The same goes for many modern car headlight bulbs, they can explode if they come in contact with the oils on human skin. Not really dangerous because the headlight housing will catch any shrapnel (though driving with a missing headlight obviously isn't the safest thing you could possibly do), but can be costly at anywhere from $30 to over $100 a bulb. Wear gloves if you plan on changing them yourself.
- What happens when farmers misapply chemical growth accelerators to their crops? Exploding watermelons!
- Since matter goes boom when exposed to antimatter, one could say that, technically, the entire universe is made of explodium. Just one gram of matter and one gram of antimatter could create the same amount of energy as detonating over 42 kilotons of TNT. Thankfully, actual antimatter seems to naturally occur only in the form of occasional individual antiparticles, never enough in one place to even accumulate a single gram, and most of it annihilated with matter in the first seconds of life of the Universe, with just a very small amount of matter surviving which forms the current Universe. Just why this is when one would expect the Big Bang to have produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts is still one of the big unsolved cosmological mysteries.
- Some Japanese aircraft during World War II, particularly the A6M Zero, G4M "Betty" and Ki-43 "Oscar", were very lightly armored, lacked self-sealing fuel tanks, and had ineffective (or non-existent) fire-suppression systems. As a result they had a tendency to catch on fire and explode even from relatively light hits. It certainly didn't help that some Japanese aircraft often had higher than normal magnesium content in their structural framework and skins...
- Linseed oil is a common paint thinner used in oil painting. It doesn't have fumes and it's all-natural, pressed from flax. But it oxidizes quickly in an exothermic reaction, strong enough that if you soak a rag in linseed oil and then leave it to dry crumpled up, the amount of surface area in a limited space means that the heat builds up very quickly. Give it thirty minutes, and your rag will spontaneously catch fire. In fact, discarded rags soaked in linseed oil are what started the 1991 One Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia that killed 3 firefighters and damaged the 38-story office tower so badly it later had to be demolished.
- Russian tanks have an alarming tendency to be this, take the T-72 for example, it has unprotected fuel tanks on the rear, it's autoloader design means that any single point around the turret will have an live shell right next to it, pointed inwards and completely unprotected in case of an ammo explosion and mostly happens to be either A: Rockets B: High Explosive Shells or C: HEAT shells.
- This was why during The Gulf War, one of the more iconic images of the destroyed Iraqi Army's Russian-made tanks (and Chinese-made versions of Russian tanks) was the burnt shell of a tank with the turret either several feet away or upside down on top of the tank. An explosive of some sort (a rocket, missile or armor-piercing anti-tank round) would penetrate the hull, causing a massive build-up of heat and pressure, or simply leave the tank burning. The heat, pressure or fire would then spread to the exposed ammunition, causing an ammunition cook-off massive enough to hurl the turret up to forty to sixty feet in the air, which typically weigh some several tons.
- However T-90SM, the most recent variant of T-90 uses armored turret bustle like other contemporary tanks, minimizing damage done by anything that goes through its active protection system & reactive armor. Future tank project "Armata" will not repeat that mistake.
- Wet charge in a Steel Mill. A charge of scrap containing water, snow or other watery impurities such as organic residues, or oil or lubricants, loaded in an electric arc furnace or basic oxygen furnace, will cause a VERY showy - and dangerous - explosion. The water or oil will evaporate suddenly and splash molten steel and gases around, causing havoc and even damaging the oven itself. This is called a wet charge. The usual way of avoiding it is to pre-heat the charge to 300°C to evaporate and burn off any moisture and oil.
- Same principal but on a smaller scale- nearly five people are killed and 60 injured every year due to accidents related to attempted deep frying of Thanksgiving turkeys. The cause is ice left over from improperly thawed/clean birds coming in contact with extra-hot cooking oil, causing a flaming oil explosion/geyser that can kill spectators and raze homes.
- Same principal but on a smaller scale- nearly five people are killed and 60 injured every year
- Noble gas compounds tend to be... touchy. The fluorides and oxides are an uneasy partnership of either fluorine or oxygen (both of which love stealing electrons) and an element that does not like sharing electrons. Eventually, the noble gas will get its electrons back while the fluorine and oxygen atoms go off to fluorinate or oxidize something else. Xenon compounds are also known to be among the strongest oxidizers, so even if it doesn't blow up on its own, any trace of organics will make it explode.
- Aircraft carriers in general. Since they're loaded up with hundreds to thousands of tons of munitions and fuel, anything that can set them off, whether it be enemy fire or accidental discharge of friendly weapons on board, can lead to extremely dangerous fires that can destroy the ship. And this is an improvement over WWII, due to the fact that modern jet fuel is considerably less volatile than the high-octane aviation gasoline used by aircraft back then.
- In Africa, Lake Kivu, Lake Nyos, and Lake Monoun have, thanks to unique geological features in the area (including the presence of active volcanoes) a tendency to build up concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide gases to the point where the lakes themselves have a tendency to periodically explode. The dangerous part comes after the explosion, however, as Deadly Gas washes over the surrounding area and suffocates everything inside. The lesson? If you ever see the lake exploding run and don't come back.
- All of the transactinide elements (those past 103 on the periodic table) and most of the transuranic elements (past 92) are this, as their extremely short half-lives would cause any appreciable amount to release a stupendous amount of energy as the nuclei decayed. Fortunately, they do not exist in nature for exactly this reason*.
- On January 27, 1967, during a ground test inside their Command Module spacecraft, atop an unfueled rocket, the Apollo 1 crew of first American spacewalker Ed White, second American in space Gus Grissom and rookie Roger Chaffee were asphyxiated in 15 seconds when the interior of their spacecraft burst into flame. Internal electrical flaws caused a spark. Worst of all, the spacecraft was pressurized at 15 psi with a pure-oxygen atmosphere, soaking even flame-resistant materials to the point that they would burn. The spacecraft burst as the internal pressure reached over 29 psi during the fire. The redesigned Command Module not only proved fireproof as the moon missions began, but waterproof. When the Apollo 13 command module lost all long-term power and had to be shutdown for an emergency flight home in April 1970, significant water condensation built up inside the spacecraft. Thankfully, there were no electrical shorts when the command module was restarted from battery power as the crew prepped the spacecraft for its reentry and splashdown.
- Prince Rupert's Drops will explode from a tiny bit of breakage at the tail, almost like a real life version of cartoon physics. Bizarrely, they're Made of Iron at the same time; in spite of being made of glass, you can hit the head with a hammer without breaking it.
- Most torpedoes in WWII were propelled by either steam, electrical, or burner-cycle engines (basically a diesel engine), with experiments into using hydrogen peroxide. Alone among all nations, the Japanese used compressed oxygen to propel their torpedoes, particularly the famous Type 93 Long Lance. Compressed oxygen gave Japanese torpedoes greater range and speed than their foreign counterparts, and were also wakeless, which meant that they were far harder to spot and evade. The downside, of course, was the compressed oxygen, as elemental oxygen is hideously reactive, meaning any sort of nearby combustion would set them off. And on top of that, the torpedoes were placed right next to the engine compartments. No less than three heavy cruisers - Mikuma, Chokai, and Suzuya - were sunk by bombs or shells setting off their torpedoes, and that's not counting any of the destroyers or light cruisers that suffered the same fate. Chokai has the indignity of being the only cruiser ever to be lost at the hands an aircraft carrier's guns rather than its aircraft, with the escort carrier USS White Plains detonating a torpedo rack with a single shell form her single 5" anti-aircraft gun.
- Any dead star - a white dwarf or neutron star - is basically a sun-sized nuclear bomb sealed in a can. They'll go about their happy post-lives for as long as you please, spinning, radiating, glowing and doing all the other things dead stars do. Until something big enough hits them. For white dwarfs, this is usually the matter from an orbiting "normal" star or another white dwarf; for neutron stars, it's usually another neutron star. When that happens, the resulting explosion can be felt across a galaxy. In the case of neutron stars, these giant explosions, referred to as kilonovas, are believed to be one of the ways the universe gets its supply of elements heavier than iron, including gold, uranium and bismuth, for example. So, if you happen to take some bismuth subsalicylate tablets to treat an upset stomach while looking at your phone, tablet or computer (which have gold in their circuits), you’re using two items that couldn’t exist in their current form without giant explosions in space billions of years ago creating them!
- Assuming protons do not decay much earlier, it has been estimated that the most massive black dwarfsnote will basically explode as supernovae after a really very long time.
- Assuming protons do not decay much earlier, it has been estimated
- Anything that's stored or transported under high pressure is potentially this, even if it's something like sand that's otherwise totally inert — because it's not the substance that's the risk, it's the pressure. It's safe as long as the pressure containment is intact, but if it's breached or punctured in any way, the pressure differential can cause the pressurized unit to explode violently. This is one of the reasons why decompression of an aircraft can be so catastrophic — the force of the depressurization is enough to tear out critical control systems.
- If we are talking explodium in chemistry, then the helonium (hydrohelium) cation, a cation consisting of helium bonded to a hydrogen atom, is a particularly ridiculous example. The Other Wiki describes it in this manner:"It is stable in isolation, but extremely reactive, and cannot be prepared in bulk, because it would react with any other molecule with which it came into contact."
- Helonium is the strongest possible acid - it can even protonate such normally stable chemicals as methane, with the resulting reaction putting out enough energy to put a complete breakfast to shame. It's normally produced naturally when the tritium in diatomic hydrogen molecules that consist of it and a lighter isotope decays, forming Helium-3 that remains bonded to the hydrogen. Of course, the resulting cation doesn't last long, as it is so ridiculously reactive.
- Pentaboranes, once considered as exotic rocket fuels, are some of the most heinous chemicals known to man. Pentaborane(9) in particular, is one of the few chemicals to have a "perfect" score on the fire diamond. To behold, its vapor is explosive when mixed with air, it readily reacts with many things to form compounds that are also explodium, and it's also Made of Incendium since it's pyrophoric and reacts with many standard fire suppressants such as water. Oh, and it's also hideously toxic and so are the compounds it combusts into. Unsurprisingly, all of the american "Green Dragon" stocks were destroyed when it was deemed completely unworkable.
