Now a very popular topic about the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has been erupting for a month, photographs and videos show how lava rises from under the Earth through cracks in the asphalt and spills along the roads, and it's very good that there are no victims - only destruction.
The question, of course, is stupid from the point of view of the result, but purely theoretically: what will happen to a person who touches a liquid stone?
Lava flowing in Hawaii has a temperature of over 1,700 ° C; that's five times hotter than your average home oven. By submerging your hand in a melt of this temperature, you will not immediately lose a limb, but you will get serious burns - "You will burn out the nerve endings, boil off the subcutaneous fat," David Damby, a chemist at the Volcano Research Center at the US Geological Survey, explains to The Verge magazine.
While the lava burns the body outside, says Damby, the water boiling up from the nearby presence of molten rock will destroy you from within. But unlike Gollum in the ending of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, you're unlikely to dive into lava like water. For this, the liquid stone is too viscous. Volcanologist Janine Krippner adds that instead of sinking into lava, you're more likely to sit or lie on its surface. In addition, lava flows slowly (in most cases you can simply leave without going to a trot) and quickly cools down, and a hard crust forms on it, along which you can even run, which this guy did during the eruption of Etna. Don't try it yourself!
Well, this is certainly some kind of nonsense, not lava. Although it seems to me there was a high probability that his leg would fall inside and he would already be very bad.
In general, lava is dangerous and scary, but not too much. During the eruption, there are more dangerous things - for example, volcanic mud flows, lahars. They usually have the consistency of liquid cement and pick up a higher speed than lava - up to 200 km / h. They carry chunks of stone, hot and cold, water and pumice, and sometimes cover entire cities, killing residents - as happened in 1985 in Colombia during the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano.
Pyroclastic flows are also very dangerous - a mixture of high-temperature volcanic gases, ash and stones. It is impossible to escape from them, the speed of propagation sometimes reaches 700 km / h, and the temperature is 700 ° C. It was the pyroclastic flow that destroyed the population of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD.
And if they still return to reality, then this is what will happen to a person trapped in lava:
Promotional video:
Tin, right?
Fine, fine.
This is a montage:)