What Mushroom Clouds Can Reveal About The Waco Explosion
By Kyle Hill |
On Wednesday night a fertilizer plant north of Waco, Texas, caught fire and exploded. The violent rupture shook the earth for miles around (the explosion was picked up by seismographs in Oklahoma), set fire to the surroundings, and collapsed nearby buildings.
Tragically, as you might suspect with an explosion this size, there are many suspected fatalities and hundreds have been admitted to area hospitals.
As chilling pictures like these rolled in, the comparison to an atomic mushroom cloud by the media was immediate. The Waco explosion was no hydrogen bomb, but the visual evidence does suggest a connection to a nuclear cloud. Looking at nuclear clouds might even be a good way to figure out how big the explosion in Waco was.
Over the decades, countries around the world have conducted nuclear explosion tests and recorded the effects. We’ve gathered so much data this way that researchers have discovered relationships between many of the bomb’s deadly variables. For example, when talking about atomic explosions, we know a general relationship between the height of the explosion’s cloud and the size—the explosive yield—of the event.
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/04/18/what-mushroom-clouds-can-reveal-about-the-waco-explosion/
