DrSkySkull thinks it is anticlimactic, but I’m kind of impressed. To find out what it would look like if a person fell into lava, some investigators made up a bag of 30kg of organic camp trash and threw it into a lava flow (they apparently couldn’t get any real human volunteers).
Spectacular! After I die, you have permission to throw my corpse into a volcano. I said after …I know you’re anxious to see the show, but no jumping the gun. Patience.
“After I die, you have permission to throw my corpse into a volcano.”
Nothing personal, but I think that’s more likely to annoy than placate the volcano gods.
An accurate representation would, of course, be a deceased pig dressed in human clothing. Perhaps a virgin pig.
And where is Dana Hunter now that we need her? I’m worried about her.
Oh, and I must pick a small nit: That appears to be a lava lake in a crater/caldera, not a lava flow.
Pele lives!
Compared to which ever it was of those Star Wars prequels that had a light saber fight near lava, the result is unanimous. More awesomer.
It’s When Time Ran Out compressed into 50 seconds!
This does seem to be mutually exclusive with your plans to have a sky burial
They were planning to use a virgin but, well, you know…
Does this blog post count as having that request in writing?
I dunno, I hear that a dude threw an apple core into Vesuvius once, and we saw how that turned out.
@7 Chris Hall
Nah, just throw the vultures in after they’re done!
Not quite as impressive as Gollum, but then he had a magic ring to catalyze things.
Littering! Go pick that up!
It looks like one of my burps after eating Uncle Julio’s Spicy Enchiladas with beans.
Empedocles was onto something!
That’s… pretty damn cool. Where do I sign up (for, you know, after I kick it)?
@ Trebuchet #2, I’m worried too. Has anyone heard anything since that last post on the twitter page?
I’m curious what the dynamics of the situation was to get that effect. If I had to guess, the long drop broke up the cooled surface that was containing the hotter material, which started bubbling up through openings, which further disrupted the surface, bringing out more hot material.
Nah, it just means it’s a race: Whoever gets a hold of the body first decides how to dispose of it. Within the parameters established by PZ, of course. We’re not barbarians.
Hmmm… I always thought that being far less dense than molten rock, a body would just sit on top of the lava and cook like a sausage on a frying pan.
30 kg is pretty small for a human equivalent. Couldn’t they find 70 kg worth of trash?
But Brazilian football has never been the same since he retired.
Maybe they were emulating throwing a small child into the lava. Perhaps as a lesson to a small child?
More multicultural berserkers.
Don’t worry, with all the fighting over poopyhead’s body, there’s gonna be plenty of bodies. The main problem I foresee is finding any chunks large left of any body to be worth the trouble of lugging to the volcano (or whatever). I mean, you look like a right twit pouring about a gramme’s worth of unidentifiable mush on a pool of lava (or whatever).
Watching that gave me some seriously weird Call of the Void feelings.
“You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would, destroy the Sith, not join them. It was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in Darkness.”
What are you talking about? There was no lava in any of the 3, and only 3, existing Star Wars movies.
Does the equivalent/comparable chemical output of this combustion spill into the atmosphere as compared with a standard interment?
I only ask because I’d like to return the bulk of my nutrients to the planet, but I’d be concerned about locking tasty bits into a long term relationship* with a caldera instead of leeching them into some soil.
*Even phone contracts make me edgy….
Pretty cool, but did any of the volcanic island cultures actually throw people (virgins or not) into volcanos, or is that just something that happened in movies?
@17 bronzedog – I thought it may have been due to the effect of adding water content to the molten silicate. It may have been an effect and not the cause, but puffs of steam and gas seemed to boil up and evaporate with each upsurge in the eruption.
So that scene at the end of Lord of the Rings with Gollum wasn’t accurate, eh?
Amphiox @30
Gollum fell into running lava. This experiment was with standing lava plus Sauron wasn’t distracted by an army being rude next to his country’s front door.
I’d call that a bonus.
Wow. I’m astonished at how big an effect that is, and how long it lasts. I wonder if it’s more to do with breaking the crust, or more to do with being organic material? Or something like how it’s a bad idea to add water to hot oil?
@Trebuchet and @Dave — Just this morning I was poking around the internet for news of Dana. I don’t really do Twitter, but I have an account, and looked for you, Trebuchet, in hopes you might have news, but couldn’t determine which was you. I don’t want Dana to be pressured by people worrying, but it would be awfully reassuring to have some word she’s within reasonable parameters of OK, and whether there’s any tangible help we actually could supply — money, rocks, Archie McPhee gift certificates, extra cats, mana, whatever. I hope she knows it’s OK to ask for anything she needs. My Twit-o-nym is at psanityblog, or I can be contacted at my nym at gmail, if anyone knows anything. Geology always makes me miss her, also birds.
@32:
PZ could require he be ‘deposited’ with a bible, koran, bom, etc. — that should annoy not only the volcano gods, but plenty of death cultists!
Me as well, if it’s compatible with being an organ donor (or if I die of something that makes my corpse useless for that). I suppose I ought to tell my partners….
Cool. I always thought space “burial” was the way to go–after you’re dead!–or possibly promession (basically the body is frozen with liquid nitrogen, then shattered by vibration), but now this looks to be the winner.
Maybe if I have enough funds when I’m older I can somehow combine all three; flash frozen with LN, placed in a rocket and launched into space, then the reentry capsule comes back down into an active volcano. Yes, it seems silly to have a reentry capsule to protect human remains just so they can then be burned up in a caldera instead, but we must respect the dead!
that.
first thing I learned in general shop class as a teen was:
“DON’T EVER PUT ANYTHING WET IN THE KILN!!!”
because bad things will happen.
…followed by the inevitable story of little Johnny, who was blown up in a kiln explosion when he dropped his soda/glass of milk/spit/peed into the kiln.
true though; superhot molten material does tend to get explody when you drop water into it. and you’re right, it’s mostly because of the rapid expansion of water vapor. same thing that causes your hot oil to splatter on you when cooking wet bacon.
*looks at the burn marks on the back of hand from last bacon frying episode*
…and by kiln I of course meant smelter.
need moar coffee.
oh, fwiw, another message I always heard was “don’t put metal in the microwave!”
which, normally, is actually pretty good advice (though try tossing an old CD in a microwave for about 3 seconds sometime – results are very cool and will not harm your microwave).
but, there IS a way to put metal in a microwave without causing it to short out.
I’m thinking that a lot of the effect would have been the same with a rock. I see a crust there, and imagine that the solid crust had sealed in the gas bubbles in the molten lava. When the crust broke, the gases went off like a geyser, in a chain reaction of reduced pressure.
The liquid in the garbage would have just gone up in a flash of steam, and I don’t see the solids setting off nucleation like Mentos in Diet Coke … and that would require dissolved gasses, now, wouldn’t it. But if the liquid lava were really liquid, the water could have gone a ways down, maybe.
I thought it was damned impressive.
I love observational science!
drken @28:
Hmmm, interesting question. A quick google search turns up examples of human sacrifice _involving_ volcanoes, but I haven’t found any examples of people thrown into volcanoes. Perhaps its just a movie thing.
Then there’s this:
you’re not getting it.
superheated, rapidly expanding steam.
haven’t you ever cooked something in hot oil that splattered?
moisture can cause those droplets of hot oil to get flung a LONG way.
@16 & 33: I’ve got nothing. I emailed Ed and PZ and Ed says he’s heard nothing and is also concerned.
When it’s my time, I hope the impact velocity is so high all that’s left is a short burst of x-rays.
also, for those who think you would be immediately incinerated on hitting lava… nope.
there is a display in the geology dept at the University of Hawaii that has a pair of asbestos pants that were worn by a geologist that survived dropping into a moving river of lava while monitoring the outflow of an eruption a few decades back.
the lava cooled around his legs, creating a solid pocket where the temperature was cool enough it didn’t incinerate him, and he survived for the few minutes it took them to pull him out with a helicopter.
so, what this has to do with dropping the bag of organic refuse is… the moisture contained in it would not have immediately evaporated just on contacting the surface of the lava, but would have been driven down into the lava, where it would then quickly produce superheated steam bubbles which caused the eruptive process you saw.
no, it’s not like mentos in coke, as in the surface lava, most of the gasses would have already escaped the liquid.
My will is going to be very strange. It seems I’m going to have to specify the destination for various bits of my body: this part goes into a volcano, this part gets a sky burial, this part goes to feed the marine invertebrates off the shore of the Olympic Peninsula, that bit gets bronzed and mounted on a pedestal, this scrap goes to medicine, this other very interesting bit gets donated to science for study.
Count me in for cremation by lava. What a send-off!
Count me in also for concern about Dana. I hope she is OK – the long silence is disturbing.
Yeah, you are right, I was underestimating the effect of the water making steam. Just two days ago I was considering boiling water under gasoline, too. I blame the video included with the linked post, where a can of Coke gets run over by a lava flow and just whistles.
But I will say that it was not all the steam. I say the top layer of the lava, the solidified part, was serving as a foamed insulative cap and as a strong pressure lid. The layer of lava under that was rich in bubbles that had risen to the top, and in lighter lava with dissolved gasses, all under pressure.
Like I said, it went off like a geyser when the top was broken. You can see that top layer collapse into a crater, at one point. I say a lot of that eruption is the lava and its own gasses.
The liquid in the garbage would have expanded to maybe 100 cubic meters, at a rough calculation, which is about the size of the eruption. I still want to see a rock as a control.
I was reading something on meteors or bombs the other day, and recall that an impacting body will only penetrate its own length if the densities are similar and the impactor is spherical. So either that garbage stopped almost at once on hitting heavy lava, and the steam had a short trip to go back out, or it went down into foamy lava, which foamed up out of the hole along with the steam.
Somebody needs to go there and conduct more tests.
it’s now on my bucket list to make a list like that.
I know of no geologist who would disagree.
:)
Star wars Vader: The Force
LOTR Gollum: The Ring
Pharyngula PZ: The Beard*
trebuchet @ 11:36 am:
live pigs were good enough for NATO:
“My will is going to be very strange. It seems I’m going to have to specify the destination for various bits of my body”
John Prine beat you to it by about four decades, but I think I like your list better.
the actual operation itself sounds positively horrific, but I have to admit to chuckling at the name they gave it.
Precioussssss …. !
Volcanic burial…? Naah.
Just put my carcass into a cannon.
Then locate one of those super-exclusive night clubs that won’t let you in unless you are a niece of God, or own Halliburton.
Fire my corpse into the nightclub, preferably aiming at the center of the dance floor, and watch the reactions of the guests.
Impressive.
Empedocles, that noble soul,
Jumped into Aetna,
And was roasted whole.
Don’t forget you can also be cremated and compressed into a diamond.