Science Explains - Blue Lava
What color is lava? Red? Yes? Well, not always. Sometimes, the flames are bright blue.
Okay, it is not technically lava but rather liquid sulfur. But that isn’t any less dangerous! If you want to get close to it, you better wear a gas mask as the fumes are very toxic. Then again, what the hell are you doing next to an erupting volcano?!
If you click through the sources at the end of this post, you can see several pictures taken by an adventurous photographer who was present when the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia erupted.
Sulfuric gases, pressed through cracks in the ground were heated up to about 600°C and ignited when they came in contact with the air on the surface. Giant flames, almost 5 meters high, were the result of this. When the gases condensed, the liquid, lava-like sulfur formed and poured down the hill.
It is always fun to see something burning in other colors than just boring red and yellow. And there are a lot of colors available!
Barium for example burns in a beautiful green:
But why do those different elements burn in different colors?
Explaining this is a bit tricky, as I don’t know how much you know about atoms and electrons. But I’ll try to make it simple:
Each atom has a certain number of electrons. That number varies with each element. The electrons are located in different “shells” of that atom. If you add energy (= heat it up), the electrons can “jump” into a higher level. But it doesn’t stay there. It “drops” back again and releases the energy that was put in in the first place. In some cases, that energy corresponds to a wavelength we can see as a color.
This is kind of useful if you want to find out what element you’re working with. Just burn it!
Just not all of it. You won’t have anything left to work with.
This was the last part of my pre-written “vacation posts”! If everything goes as planned, we should return to my regular kind of posts tomorrow.
If I didn’t die in a horrible plane crash, of course. See you around!
Sources:
Volcano erupts in bright blue flames: Stunning photos
Stunning Electric-Blue Flames Erupt From Volcanoes
This indonesian volcano erupts electric blue lava
Why do different elements make different color flames when you burn them?
First Picture taken from pixabay.com
Other credit:
Barium: German Wikipedia, original upload 30. Sep 2004 by Ertua: de:Bild:Boratflamme.jpg
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@suesa, I wanna be able to inform this well, lol. There is one more volcano about to erupt, again in Indonesia. Dont know if I should term it natural phenomena or bad news.
Great post. When I saw the blue flame larva I was thinking that it was blue because the flame of my gas burner is blue too, until I read further to find out it was Sulphur. If am correct the phenomenon where electrons jump from one level to another is called entropy or enthalpy,am not sure(did some chemistry in high school). Good post
Nice @suesa
Good luck for your posting..
Dont forget upvote dan follow me..
Thank you for the lovely post, wishing you all the best.:) information is sure to come in handy, but more than that, it gives me great confidence to know your hard work is being the useful.
Impressive! It would be fun to see 5 meter tall blue flames. maybe you could toss some enemies into it!!!! Between any way to create a black fire!
As I said to @ruth-girl (she wrote on this recently too: here), this is something I would like to see, at least once in my life.
It does sound really amazing
Great, but not in some case correspond to a wavelength, always correspond to. The problem is that depending on the energy level of electrons the wavelenght can be in the range of uv, visible, infrared, xray, etc. So we only can see on the visible región, but always that an electrón is excited and then relax its going to emitte energy.
Great
Post is great
When I saw the lava from that volcano, my eyes blinked at the first sight of that fire
Maybe if I came close to my eyes will be lost .. very scary
greeting @walidsalah
wow good chemistry and i love science 🎉