I was watching an old godzilla movie- godzilla vs <insert target monster> in which the giant radioactive lizard was at risk of going Chernobyl. Now, Godzilla movies are not known for their accuracy concerning radioactivity, biology, geology, physics or the time it takes to rebuild Tokyo, but one interesting piece of english dubbed speculation did arise.
“There is a risk that if Godzilla explodes, he may ignite the atmosphere.”
Is it possible to ignite the Earth’s atmosphere without a radioactive, 30 story tall lizard?
During my time at Science City Zero, we determined that there is nothing you could do which would ignite the atmosphere. The pressure and temperature required to make atmospheric oxygen combine with other gasses will not occur over a large enough volume to allow combustion.
Our atmosphere is some 70% nitrogen. The oxygen would combine with other stuff very quickly (ie, burn) except for the fact that the concentration of oxygen is very low, due to the nitrogen.
As a result, oxygen has to be content* to gnaw away at stuff slowly (ie, corrosion).
<mrscience>Did you know it’s possible to burn water? Florine has a higher affinity for things like hydrogen than does oxygen. If you were to mix flourine and water, KABOOM!, and you’d wind up with hydrogen flouride and O2</mrscience>
The reason that the atmosphere won’t burn is that there isn’t anything flammable in the atmosphere except in trace quantities. Hydrogen and Methane are the closest things to being in flammable quantities and they are on the order of 0.01%. If you raised the temperature enough you could get the hydrogen and methane to combine with oxygen but it wouldn’t look much like ignition.
The atmosphere will ignite when there is enough fine particles of anything flammable in it. Wheat dust can create an explosive atmosphere in a grain silo, iron dust in a steel mill, and turn of the century clothing mills would explode if the cotton dust was not exhausted quickly enough. Plus, Godzilla likes bean and onion burritos.
Since the Trinity Test was on July 16, 1945, and Godzilla was first discovered as **Gojira **(1954), that pretty much means he arrived too late for serious scientists to worry if the explosion would ignite the atmosphere. But there’s a saying in the military: 10% never get the word. So they probably would have worried, had the monster been real. For sure all the media would have worried, as they mistrust scientific findings entirely.