How a dash of mercury can rip a jet plane apart

There are hatful of reasons why you do n’t want to be around mercury under any circumstances . It ’s toxic , and can lead to worked up and mental instability . On planes , it can lead to morphologic imbalance . As in , rip them apart . But how ?

How does a airplane , which is made to withstand being accelerated up to seven hundred land mile an time of day by burning squirt fuel , get ripped to pieces by a broken thermometer ? Chemistry , that ’s how . Chemistry is the modern equivalent weight to witchcraft . “ Oh , add the XXXX - eat to the YYYY - ide , and they ’ll short consume each other and develop a vapour that drink down everyone in the room . ” That ’s the kind of statement that ’s made by a beldam stir a cauldron full of woollen of bat . The only reason we do n’t start out a modern mean solar day witch James Henry Leigh Hunt is because everyone knows it ’s too dangerous to expose a chemistry professor to an open flaming .

Of course it does n’t help that plane are the equivalent of flying soda lav , in that they are cylindrical and made of aluminium . Flimsy as it sounds , Al is a dependable choice in most situations . It ’s low-cal , substantial , and it has an outer ‘ shell ’ so hard that it ’s the next best thing to coating the carpenter’s plane in diamonds . atomic number 26 , so impregnable in buildings , rusts when , say , flying over the ocean every sidereal day . And when it rust when it combines with oxygen . It become into clean , crimson snowflake that can be rubbed off . Aluminum , when it combines with oxygen , forms aluminium oxide , an incredibly hard substance that is scratch tolerant . ( The arbitrary and extreme difference between iron and aluminum ’s reaction to oxygen is yet further proof for alchemy - as - witchcraft . ) Since it does n’t flake off off , the direction branding iron rust fungus does , it varnish the rest of the atomic number 13 off , preventing further rust and create the integral social organisation perfect for air travel .

Hg disrupt this perfection . Or , at least , it does the consequence that it hits a part of the aluminum that has been late scratched . The here and now it does hit this , it combines with the aluminum , tearing it away from the gravid social system . Of course , when the aluminum and quicksilver amalgam attain air again , the aluminium recombines with the O to form that same , super - hard aluminum oxide . It just form it in the wrong station , produce ‘ feather ’ or ‘ pillars ’ of oxide up from the pool of Hg .

This move of the oxide away from the original scrape lets the Hg keep pull through the aluminium until the mercury itself vaporize into the atmosphere , and so a low amount of mercury can do a huge amount of damage . There are hearsay that governments during the World Wars used to attempt to sabotage each other ’s woodworking plane by smear hydrargyrum on them . More credible are the account of someone breaking a thermometer near some aluminum , say on a car park work bench , and realise the next day that there were massive holes consume through the structure .

So today ’s lesson , small fry , is do n’t bring mercury on planes . Ever . Unless you are a supervillain , in which case we ’ll let Batman deal with you .

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