So, what does an underwater blast look like? Specifically, what would a torpedo hit on a submarine look like? I ask because I saw a movie recently that showed bursts of flame when subs took hits. Maybe we can accept fiery explosions in Star Wars space battles, because very few people have all been in space; but we all know that water puts out fire. Is there some explanation for a bloom of fire when a torpedo hits, or is this just going to have to remain a strike against an otherwise-good movie?
Just a guess, but I’d think there would be some “flame”. When a bomb goes off, it creates rapidly-expanding gas. This gas (which contains the burning material of the explosive) displaces the surrounding water until the water pressure exceeds the pressure of the bubble. So anything in the vivinity of the blast would first be hit with the shockwave, and then by the force of the water rushing to close the relative vacuum. While the bubble exists, I’d assume there would be “fire” inside of it.
I’ve heard explosions defined as very fast burning, and rusting as being very slow burning. In an explosion, however, as opposed to burning, the necessary chemicals don’t come from the atmosphere, they’re all present in the chemicals that are exploding.
Which is to say that there certainly is a burse of “flame” in an underwater explosion. You’ve never thrown a cherry bomb into a lake at night and seen the resulting flash?
As a vaguely related comment, I once found a book describing techniques for “underwater explosive forming.” According to the book, the curved steel plates for ships used to be bent into shape by the use of explosives. The plate of steel would be suspended in a tank of water over a submerged charge of TNT. The pressure from the explosion bends the steel, and you can vary the plate’s curvature by altering the amount of explosives and the distance between plate and explosion.
I always wanted to make a sculpture of my own with this technique, but nobody ever wanted to give me access to tons of steel and TNT, darn it!
Water may put out flame, but it’s not instantaneous. It takes time for heat to transfer into the water, and with explosions, there will be enough heat that it vaporizes a fair amount of the surrounding water. The upshot being that there will be enough heat around to burn for a little while.
Apologies for drifting further from the OP, but it seems to have been answered, and I have something for Chas.E.
There’s this artist, Evelyn Rosenberg, that does do sculpture with explosives. She does it out in the desert, not under water, however. She lays a sheet of metal over the top of a collection of objects, and puts a thin sheet of the plastic explosive on top of that. She sets it off, and the metal is shaped to the objects underneath. She calls it Detonographics.
The objects underneath the sheet can be almost anything. She often uses woodcarvings, but she’ll form a sort of collage of other stuff as well. On the Discovery Channel show I saw her on, she made one that had lettuce leaves in it. Because of the dynamics of the blast, this quarter-inch bronze plate she was using stamped itself into the shape of the leaves. It was really cool to watch.
Check out her site: Detonographics
Now that I looked at the site a bit more, I find I am in error. She uses a clay sculpture as her base, not wood.