13:36
I don't know why this train of thought just now decided to stop at the station of my mind but oh well, now I'm sharing it with you guys. chemistry nerds please help analyze.
For those who are wondering, this stems back to some video that ended up circulating on the internet many years ago depicting exactly what you'd expect, and the mythbusters got ahold of it and tested it themselves, finding that it did indeed explode. I don't know if they quantitatively measured the strength of the explosion but it wasn't a slow ignition, it was definitely a detonation. they put forth a few theories about what might have happened but none of them really satisfy, including:
- extreme heat from thermite reaction dissociating H and O in water, which then recombines and explodes
- something mechanically aerosolizes the burning thermite mixture, which explodes
- redox reaction wherein water donates oxygen to iron or aluminum, leaving free hydrogen, which explodes
but none of those seem to make sense. crucially, this only happens with ice, it is not recorded to occur using liquid water, so something about the solid state is crucial to the picture, but I don't know what