Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
1–10 of 255 posts
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#2I am awestruck. What an awful event. I will be keeping up to date with this and looking for ways I can help... All I know to do right now is pray for those that have suffered from this. My breath has been taken away...
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#3Similar in size to the Halifax explosion, then.
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#4The media doesn't seem to understand how big this is yet in short and long term damage and loss of life. I guess that doesn't matter? They are more for political bickering now?
Running theory Ammonium Nitrate stored at port for many years -
https://mobile.twitter.com/HachemYassin/status/1290702640930...
[Edit] Skipping the loss of grain and produce in port and the actual port in a country on the brink during a pandemic this isn't just 50 dead short term https://mobile.twitter.com/asharfouch/status/129071410457584...
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#5Similar in size to the Halifax explosion, then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
Wow, and for comparison the viral 2015 Tianjin explosions in total released 28 tonnes of TNT of energy, or 100GJ.
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#6Unless I'm missing something they forgot to account for the fact that dimensional analysis will only give you a result up to a constant.
This should be somewhat obvious as otherwise you'd get a different result with different units (and no SI units won't save you here, those just work for several common equations in physics not ones you came up with yourself).
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#7At max 0.2K TNT
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#8Unless I'm missing something they forgot to account for the fact that dimensional analysis will only give you a result up to a constant. This should be somewhat obvious as otherwise you'd get a different result with different units (and no SI units won't save you here, those just work for several common equations in physics not ones you came up with yourself).
it's not really dimensional analysis. the same methodology was used to estimate the Trinity blast.
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#9Unless I'm missing something they forgot to account for the fact that dimensional analysis will only give you a result up to a constant. This should be somewhat obvious as otherwise you'd get a different result with different units (and no SI units won't save you here, those just work for several common equations in physics not ones you came up with yourself).
The underlying assumption in this analysis is that the constant is 1.
Maybe I should have clarified that in the thread.. Thank you for pointing it out!
Re: Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT
#10Wikipedia's page of the largest non-nuclear explosions [1] was already updated and states "It generated a shock-waves equivalent to 13 tonnes TNT". Not sure who made this estimation and how, but various photos on that page can give you an idea what a large explosion looks like. For example take a look at the Yamato explosion [2]. Yamato was a 70000 ton Japanese battleship; the large explosion was due to its magazines being hit by bombs (this happened quite frequently when battleships were hit as they were fundamentally stacks and stacks of gun ammunition surrounded by a hull); it's likely that Yamato was carrying a few thousand tons of explosives, so that's how you get a few kt TNT non-nuclear explosion. Now in that photo you can see for reference another ship in the lower left. It looks quite puny. So, it appears to me the Yamato mushroom cloud was much, much bigger than today's mushroom cloud in Beirut.
Edit: The wikipedia page was updated and now states 1kt TNT.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear...
.jpg){kind=link}