Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#2Mercury actually concentrates into little beads on cinnabar ore, and is not very reactive. I can imagine drops of it surviving for a few thousands years.
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#3Interesting parallel to the flowing rivers is mercury in the best known Chinese tomb:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/flowing-rivers-mer...
Speaking of using robots to investigate mysterious tunnels in tombs, one of the most publicized one must be the discovery of doors in a tunnel within the Great Pyramid: http://www.sciencealert.com/robot-captures-first-images-of-g...
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#4That mercury is designed to kill anyone who enters. It's probably the source of a lot of myths surrounding raiding ancient tombs, and it's found across the globe, most prominently in China. These guys knew someone would come for their treasure someday.
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#5That mercury is designed to kill anyone who enters. It's probably the source of a lot of myths surrounding raiding ancient tombs, and it's found across the globe, most prominently in China. These guys knew someone would come for their treasure someday.
While we think of it as a hazard today, references to quicksilver in history don't connect it with killing people, see https://books.google.com/books?id=nCKxSwUlX-AC&printsec=fron... for example.
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#6At that antient times where on earth they find so much mercury? And how they place it there without killing themselves? And how they learned that it was lethal?
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#7That mercury is designed to kill anyone who enters. It's probably the source of a lot of myths surrounding raiding ancient tombs, and it's found across the globe, most prominently in China. These guys knew someone would come for their treasure someday.
While there are some extremely toxic mercury compounds, elemental mercury is not among them. See: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200006153422405
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#8That mercury is designed to kill anyone who enters. It's probably the source of a lot of myths surrounding raiding ancient tombs, and it's found across the globe, most prominently in China. These guys knew someone would come for their treasure someday.
Some of these ancient rulers thought that Mercury would prolong life.
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#9At that antient times where on earth they find so much mercury? And how they place it there without killing themselves? And how they learned that it was lethal?
In Cinnabar. They (most likely) didn't know it was unhealthy.
Re: Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb
#10At that antient times where on earth they find so much mercury? And how they place it there without killing themselves? And how they learned that it was lethal?
In Cinnabar. They (most likely) didn't know it was unhealthy.
It's worth mentioning that Hg extraction isn't very complicated. Its the kind of thing that we might expect people fooling around with putting stuff in fires would discover by accident. Just roast the ore (Cinnabar, HgS) at the relatively modest temperature of 350˚C or higher and the mercury will evaporate off, likely condensing on a nearby surface. Bam, liquid mercury. Control the condensation and you've got liquid mercury on a large scale.
By comparison, smelting iron is much more complicated (higher temperatures + it's a chemical reaction not just "bake and go" + residual carbon content must be controlled for strength + annealing strategy significantly affects its desirable properties).