#explosive

#explosive

Thousand-year-old Hand Grenade Found in JerusalemJerusalem has been the site of violence since time immemorial, and archaeologists have another bit of evidence of that history. Archaeological digs have uncovered many ceramic "sphero-conical" vessels, meaning the shape of a ball with a point. These vessels were storage for many types of materials, from oil to perfume, but now some have been found, dating to the 11th or 12th century CE, that may have been used as hand grenades. Dr. Carney Matheson of Griffith University tells us about them.“These vessels have been reported during the time of the Crusades as grenades thrown against Crusader strongholds producing loud noises and bright flashes of light.”“Some researchers had proposed the vessels were used as grenades and held black powder, an explosive invented in ancient China and known to have been introduced into the Middle East and Europe by the 13th century.”Chemical analysis shows that locally-made explosive mixtures of fatty acids, mercury, sulfur, aluminum, potassium, magnesium, nitrates, and phosphorous, could have been used for the hand grenades. Read more about this study at Sci News.-via Fark (Image credit: Robert Mason, Royal Ontario Museum)#archaeology #handgrenade #crusades #Jerusalem #explosive   

Shock Trials on US Navy Aircraft Carrier Used 40,000 lb of ExplosivesOn Friday, the US Navy used 40,000 lb (18,000 kg) of explosives as shock trials of its newest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R Ford. The blast was so huge that it registered as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake 100 miles away!From USNI News:“The first-in-class aircraft carrier was designed using advanced computer modeling methods, testing, and analysis to ensure the ship is hardened to withstand battle conditions, and these shock trials provide data used in validating the shock hardness of the ship,” the service said in a Saturday statement.Ford commanding officer Capt. Paul Lanzilotta told USNI News in March aboard the carrier that the crew had been busy preparing for the event.“That’s quite a bit of work when you have a ship with 5,000 spaces in it, so we have to prepare all of our gear,” he said.“We’re also going to prepare the crew: so the crew has to know what to expect, they need to practice their damage control procedures because that’s something that we all need to be good at, and when we shock the ship we need to make sure that we have the ship in as ready a condition as we can.”