Pretty tricky.

I am guilty of yet another right hand turn in delivering tonight's post. What was to be a short piece on rope tricks, the history of and a few crazy ass examples, rapidly morphed into a couple of lines about atomic bombs. What can I say? I'm a sucker for well documented insanity.

So whats the connection anyway? Well seems that there is a phenomenon called the "rope trick effect" that occurs when certain bombs are set off.

John Malik, a physicist, noticed this startling visual effect when looking over high speed photography of the nuclear tests in the 50's. When photographed just after detonation, the camera captured a "fireball" that looks a lot like a huge transparent marble, but what is too bloody weird are the series of spikes or long tendrils, the "ropes" that extend from the bottom of the fireball.

The ropes are actually the mooring cables being heated, followed by rapid vaporization and then expansion of the cables. Malik, being curious and artistic, tried different colours, with black producing the most pronounced effect, while ropes wrapped in foil or other reflective material didn't show at all, they just went phsst in a nano second.

Not surprisingly, surface or air detonations, or any that weren't held down by ropes didn't produce the rope effect.