WELCOME
Issue 176
“This was a whopper of a nuclear bomb, and very different from any other type of explosion”
SCAN HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO LIVESCIENCE’S NEWSLETTER
By far the biggest explosions on Earth have been natural events – volcanoes and meteorite impacts. The 1815 Mount Tambora eruption, for example, released the equivalent energy of 33 billion tonnes of TNT exploding, while the impact that wiped the dinosaurs out 66 million years ago was thousands of times bigger than that, hitting Earth with the energy of around 72 trillion tonnes of TNT. This puts the yield of the USSR’s 1961 Tsar Bomba, the world’s most powerful nuclear test at 50 million tonnes of TNT, in the pale. All the same, this was a whopper of a nuclear bomb, and very different from any other type of explosion, human-made or otherwise. Learn more about the science and history of nuclear explosions on page 26. Enjoy!