Experts say the blast, which devastated large parts of Beirut in August, was the largest non-nuclear explosion in history.
The team from the University of Sheffield in the UK said that the best estimate for the yield is tons00 tons of TNT. Equivalent, its reasonable upper limit is 1.1 kilotons.
This puts it at 20th the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945.
How the team mapped the shock wave that spread through the city.
The group hopes its work can help prepare crisis organizers for future disasters.
“When we know what the puzzles from such events are, we can do the loading work that comes from them. And it tells us how to build more sense-building buildings,” said Dr. Sam of Sheffield’s Blast and Effects Engineering. Said Sam Rigby. Research group.
“Even things like glazing. In Beirut, glazing damage was reported 10 kilometers from the center of the explosion, and we know that falling glass causes a lot of injuries.”
4 August The explosion of Gust was the result of an accidental explosion of about 2,750 tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrate. The blast killed at least 190 people and injured more than 6,000.
The Sheffield team reached its estimate by studying the video of the incident posted on social media.
When the group did this immediately after the explosion, it attacked the TNT. Preliminary estimates in the range of 1.0-1.5 kilotons.
But this was only based on a limited set of videos, which the team could find when uploading to social media or dragging down frames.
The group now has the opportunity to review more videos from the event (16 in total) to generate a comprehensive set of total data points from which to make calculations. As a result, yield estimates have improved slightly from below.
“Think of it like a baby on a swing,” Dr. Rigby said. “If you push the baby and see how far they move, then you can work out how hard the pressure was. That’s how we’ll work out the yield.”
In a matter of milliseconds, about 1GWh of energy was released from the explosion. That’s enough to power more than 100 homes a year, say researchers.
The nuclear device TNT dropped on Hiroshima. The equivalent of was in the range of 13-15 kilotons. By way of comparison, U.S. One of the Army’s largest conventional weapons, the GBU- / / B MoAB (“Massive Ordnance Air Blast”) device, has a production capacity of approximately 11 tons.
“The Beirut explosion is interesting because it sits directly in a man’s ground between most conventional weapons and nuclear weapons,” Dr Rigby said.
“It was 10 times larger than most conventional weapons and 10 to 20 times smaller than early nuclear weapons,” he told BBC News.
Dr Rigby said Beirut was in the top 10 out of the top 10 in terms of some of the most powerful man-made volcanoes in history (ignoring more powerful natural phenomena such as volcanoes, planetary influences, etc.) and perhaps some nuclear humor. Up tests (such as the “Minor Scale” – the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion, which was about 3.2 kilotons of TNT).
Beirut was a third of the minor scale.
The largest accidental explosion in history occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917, when two ships (explosives carriers) collided. It produces about 3 kg of TNT. Was equivalent, so again Beirut was around a third, give or take. Most recently, the 2015 eruption in Tianjin (China) was only half of Beirut’s yield. This again includes ammonium nitrate.
“Beirut is definitely the most powerful non-nuclear explosion of the 21st century,” said Dr. Be Rigby.
The new analysis is published in the journal Shock Waves.
Other scientists have also estimated the yield of the Beirut blast.
The BGR group in Germany used seismic, infrasonic and hydrostatic data from the incident; And Dr. J. George Diaz studied the physics of the evolution of the explosion fireball using Twitter videos.
“Significantly, we all used publicly available data and obtained consistent results by applying completely different methods,” said Dr. DJ, who is affiliated with the University of Indiana, Bloomington, USA.
