(Oops. It’s the energy required to smelt aluminum that’s very high; the recycing costs are comparatively low. Sorry.)
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Fixed that for me.
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I want to see something large and organic, like a watermelon, pumpkin, or furbee.
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I imagine the lava whispering “Shh no tears, only dreams now.”
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I think you are confusing up the difficulty of extracting aluminum from bauxite ore versus melting aluminum once it is a pure metal.
I’ve seen a few videos on youtube in which the people making casts of ant nests using a clearly home made setup in which they are using charcoal pellets as fuel and steel pot as a furnace with a leaf blower in a forced draft arrangement to get the temperature up to a level that it will melt aluminum. There’s even a video posted by YouTube user who did it using a hair drier, plastic pipe, charcoal chimney, charcoal and a small pot to melt aluminum cans
That was some of the weirdest product placement I’ve ever seen. Though I do have to admit that “K’oka Ko’la” does sound like the name of a Hawaiian volcano.
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Great. Now I have to pee.
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Haigh used sulfuric; Heisenberg used hydrofluoric, which does a MUCH better job of dissolving bones and teeth IIUC.
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I feel weird having liked your post. It was for the information, not that I liked the actual processes, okay?
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Whatever gets you through the night…
I was wondering that myself, but the (possibly wrong) explanation I came up with was that - since the lava is WAY hotter than a campfire - the side of the can may have been weakened enough by the heat to split, rather than let go with a bang. I’m guessing it was a bit of a race between can and Coke: will the can fail first, or will the Coke build up insane pressure first?
I thought that, too, until I noticed that the can ruptured with a tiny hole near the mouth and you can see coke spewing out of the tiny hole. Although, maybe that point was weakened by the excessive heat and probably even greater temperature differential between the lava and not-lava sides.
I wonder if the weight and pressure of the lava aren’t also factors. There’s probably some crushing going on in addition to the heat effects.
For anyone interested in a demonstration they did this on the Mythbusters Breaking Bad special. They had a lot of difficulty getting it to work properly (it’s certainly not as simple as depicted in Breaking Bad, where the simplicity of body disposal in those barrels intentionally became a joke), and my feeling is that most murderers would not be able to pull it off. I only read the Wikipedia article on Haigh but it seems to me that his victims would not have had to be completely dissolved. He dumped the sludge after a couple of days into an open sewer - even if there was a lot of flesh and bone intact, it would have broken apart and gotten lost down there.
Anyway, @Donald_Petersen et al. - in regards to lava I do certainly think you could hide a body. However, with a small flow like this you probably wouldn’t actually disintegrate the body - the lava would cool and form a shell around at least part of the body, which you could then break open… TV/movie writers, feel free to send me a check. You’d want to get to one of those big flows that end up in the ocean, which would either burn to a crisp or scatter irretrievably every part of the body, and then bury it under a big pile of fresh basalt.
The problem really is getting the body there. Easily solved if you plan to commit your murder on-site, but then the problem is that there are almost always constantly people observing active lava flows, no matter how small. You might have to take the approach of eliminating all the witnesses, which you could pass off as being a tragic accident.
Yeah, that makes sense. Dumping bodies into active volcanoes would be an ideal disposal, if there were any reliable way to get bodies to the volcano without attracting attention.
I guess that’s why there’s always a well-timed shove to an unsuspecting victim in those fictional cases.
Volcanology isn’t my speciality, but I’ve got a friend studying it in grad school right now and knowing her, she’s almost certainly considered this question already. My thought that the body wouldn’t be completely burned by a small flow may not be entirely true. I’ll see if I can get answers.
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Well –
Maybe we should submit this idea to David Letterman who frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee. Maybe it would inspire him to hire a local Hawaiian film crew to do a regular or reoccurring segment in which various objects - such as old-style TV sets, microwaves, refrigerators and other fancy stuff are tossed onto a Bed of Lava to be Devoured – you know, the the stuff he used throw off a five story building as a regular skit during his show in the '80s. Maybe call it –
‘Stupid Lava Tricks’
Yep. I used to work in an aluminium smelter. The foundry will remelt a lot of scrap metal because it takes very little additional energy input.
I suppose we will have to resort to the pig farm. I mean, hypothetically. Not that I know of any pig farmers.
