Big explosions throughout human history (10 Pics)

There's something both terrifying and simply mind-blowing about the sheer destructive power of large explosions, their ability to cause death and destruction, and how difficult it can be to grasp the relative destructive forces involved. Typically large explosions are categorized by their power relative to ton of TNT. Common mining operations across the world happening every day typically use explosions on the order of 1-100 tons of TNT. They don't use TNT anymore. They use Ammonium-Nitrate (also known as ANFO or chemically NH4NO3). Ammonium-Nitrate is also commonly used as a fertilizer. The explosion in Beirut this past week was one of the biggest accidental explosions in human history. Roughly 2750 tons of improperly stored Ammonium-Nitrate fertilizer was reportedly set off by a fire cause by sparks from someone welding nearby. This resulted in an explosion of around 1,500 tons of TNT and a blast wave that was felt 150 miles away.

But it wasn't the first time a huge amount of Ammonium-Nitrate was ignited by accident. On April 16, 1947 a cargo ship, the SS Grandcamp, loaded with Ammonium-Nitrate, was accidentally detonated in the port of Texas City, TX, in Galveston Bay, killing 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department. This explosion was roughly twice the size of the recent Beirut explosion at around 2,700 tons of TNT.

Thirty years earlier, during World War 1, a French cargo ship, the SS Mont-Blanc, fully laden with military explosives, and supplies for making ammunition, collided with another ship in Halifax Harbor, Nova Scotia, Canada. The explosion that followed was the largest man-made explosion ever recorded at the time, and is still to this day, the largest non-nuclear, accidental, man-made explosion, with a blast force of about 3,000 tons of TNT.

The previous three explosions were all accidental. The next two were done intentionally as weapons of war, in what I consider the darkest days of human history. They were the largest explosions ever used during combat, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 75 years ago this week. The first bomb, "Little Boy", containing 64kg of Uranium-235, was dropped on the industrial city of Hiroshima in southern Japan on August 6, 1945. The city was destroyed and an estimated 80,000 people killed, including 20,000 military personnel. The explosion was roughly equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. Three days later, the second bomb, "Fat Man", containing a different fissionable material, Plutonium, was dropped from on the city of Nagasaki, 261 miles south of Hiroshima, on August 9, 1945. Although the bomb was more powerful than the one used on Hiroshima, its effects were confined by the hillsides of the narrow Urakami Valley. There are conflicting estimates of the death toll, somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000, only 150 of whom were soldiers. The blast was nearly 50% bigger than Hiroshima, about 23,000 tons of TNT.

A very different kind of explosion occurred on June 30, 1908. A stony meteoroid, about 300ft wide, exploded in the atmosphere above the Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia. There were many much larger asteroid impact events in prehistoric Earth, such as the Chicxulub impactor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the planetoid sized impact that created our moon, but I am focusing on explosions known to have occurred during recorded human history, and the Tunguska Event is the largest that we know of in that period. The explosion flattened an 830 square mile area forest, uprooting an estimated 80,000,000 trees. It occurred in a largely unpopulated area and may have resulted in as little as 3 deaths. There's a lack of sufficient data, but the blast is roughly estimated to be about 20,000,000 tons of TNT. Similar in size to the first hydrogen nuclear bomb ever tested, known as "Castle Bravo" in 1954. Both of these explosions were roughly 1,000 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb.

On October 30, 1961, deep inside the Arctic circle in far-northern Russia, a bomb known as the RDS220 Hydrogen bomb, nicknamed "Tsar Bomba", was detonated resulting in history's largest man-made explosion. Roughly equivalent to 56,000,000 tons of TNT, the explosion created a 2 mile wide fireball hotter than the surface of the sun and caused complete destruction within a radius of 25 miles. It sent a mushroom cloud 59 miles into the sky (11 times higher than Everest), broke windows over 500 miles away, and registered as a magnitude 5.25 earthquake. If a bomb of this size was detonated over New York City it could kill 25,000,000 people. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, there are 13,865 nuclear weapons, with 90% being owned US and Russia. To say mankind has the power to destroy the entire land-surface of the planet is not an exaggeration. I consider the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as man's darkest point, but I consider man's greatest achievement the simple fact that we haven't used them on our fellow human beings in 75 years.

It goes without saying that the power of nature is greater than the power of man. The largest known explosion in human history was caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. The force has been estimated at 33,000,000,000 tons of TNT. That's 33 billion, or roughly 2,200 Hiroshima bombs. The shockwave circled the planet multiple times, and the explosion sent millions of tons of ash into the stratosphere, cooling the Earth so much that it resulted in what is known as "The year without a summer". It caused crop failures resulting in famines, and possibly triggering the largest mass migrations in the last 200 years. It ejected so much sulfur, fluorine, and chlorine into the atmosphere that it caused very vividly colored sunrises and sunsets across the world for months.

The largest known explosion in our solar system (during human history) is the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 named after the astronomers who discovered it, Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy. In July of 1994 the comet broke apart under the intense gravity of Jupiter, and several pieces impacted the gaseous surface of Jupiter. The largest impact, pictured above, resulted in a "crater" roughly the size of the Earth, and was estimated to have an energy of 36,000,000,000,000 (36 trillion) tons of TNT. About 1,100 times the power of the 1815 eruption. It's estimated that impacts like this occur in our solar system only about once every 50,000-500,000 years. (Check out this gif of the impact: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Max_Planck_Institute_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9.gif )

And that brings us to the biggest explosions in the known universe, the explosions of stars that we call a supernova. It is estimated that a supernova occurs somewhere in the observable universe about every 2 years, and in our own Milky Way galaxy about every 50 years. Humans have witnessed and recorded several supernovae, the largest of which is likely SN-2006-gy which occurred in September 2006, about 240 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC-1260. It's estimated that supernova explosions have an explosive power of... are you ready for it?... 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT. That's 34 zeros. That's the power a bomb, made of TNT, the size Earth went off... 1 trillion times. It's not a fathomable number. It's not largest one that fascinates me, but the closest one. The most dazzling celestial event in human history, SN-1006, occurring roughly 7,200 light-years away. It appeared in the night sky around the end of April in the year 1006 AD, and was recorded my many historians/scholars of that era in modern-day China, Iraq, Japan, Egypt, and Europe. It was possibly around 610 times brighter than the brightest star in the current night sky, as shown in an artist's rendering of what it may have looked like in the image above. One scholar said it was so bright you could read outside on a moonless night. Another star, 10 times closer to Earth, Betelgeuse, was theorized to be on the edge of going supernova around the end of last year. It had dimmed rapidly to almost 1/3rd it's normal brightness and it was thought that it had reached the point of collapsing in on itself and may result in a supernova that could possible even have been brighter than the full moon. It has since began to brighten again and scientists are unsure of the time frame in which red-giant stars like Betelgeuse dim and brighten, but there's always a tiny chance that something as dazzling as the possible supernova of Betelgeuse could occur in our lifetime or sometime in the next few generations.