The designers of the Civil War-era torpedo may have recognized the dangers of getting too close to a blast in water. "The Hunley is the first proven case study of lethal injuries from blast waves propagating through a solid surface," she said. Still, it's possible for blast waves to travel through surfaces and still be powerful enough to kill, according to Lance. It was just the blast wave itself that propagated into the vessel, so their injuries would have been purely in the soft tissues, in the lungs and in the brain." "But the crew of the Hunley were protected by the hull. "In that case, there are shrapnel effects and effects from the damage to the vehicle that cause broken bones and other injuries," Lance said in the statement. Blast wavesĪccording to Lance, the way the torpedo's explosion may have killed the Hunley's crew was different from how traumatic blast injuries from modern-day improvised bombs kill soldiers in vehicles. It's also likely that these individuals suffered traumatic brain injuries from the blast, she added. This would have had at least an 85 percent chance of killing each member of the crew immediately, Lance calculated. The force of the Hunley shock wave would have ripped apart the delicate structures of the lungs where the blood supply meets the air supply, filling the lungs with blood. "That creates kind of a worst-case scenario for the lungs," Lance said in the statement. While a normal blast shock wave traveling in the air should last less than 10 milliseconds, Lance calculated that the Hunley crew's lungs were subjected to 60 milliseconds or more of trauma. This slowdown amplifies the tissue damage, Lance said. "When you mix these speeds together in a frothy combination like the human lungs, or hot chocolate, it combines and it ends up making the energy go slower than it would in either one," Lance said in the statement. The kind of trauma the Hunley crew may have experienced is linked to a phenomenon that Lance called "the hot chocolate effect." This effect is linked to how vibrations such as shock waves travel at different speeds in water than they do in air - for instance, the shock wave from the Hunley blast would have traveled about 3,355 mph (5,400 km/h) in water but only about 760 mph (1,224 km/h) in the air, the researchers said. "Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years." "You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains," Lance said in a statement. The findings from the experiments suggested that the Hunley's crew died instantly when the blast wave from the torpedo traveled through the soft tissue of their bodies, especially their lungs and brains. "These experiments were very difficult to conduct." The experiments often proved exasperating:"I was often frustrated with pressure gauges that wouldn't work, with black powder that got too wet to explode, or with weather that seemed to oscillate between freezing hurricane and blistering heat," Lance said. This included repeatedly setting off pressurized-air blasts and black-powder explosions near a 6.5-foot-long (2 m) scale model of the Hunley, nicknamed the Tiny, that was fitted with sensors and floating in water. ![]() To figure out how the Hunley's torpedo may have affected its own crew, the scientists conducted a series of experiments over the course of three years. The sub rammed this spar into its target's hull and the bomb exploded, with the crew, at most, about 42 feet (12.8 m) from the blast. The Hunley's torpedo was not an underwater missile, but a copper keg of black powder held ahead of the submarine on a barbed pole, called a spar, that was about 16 feet (4.9 m) long. "Blast waves are capable of inflicting lethal injuries on someone without ever physically moving them." Torpedo tech " Blast injuries are consistent with the way the remains were found inside the boat, as blast waves would not have left marks on the skeletons, and would not have provided the crew with the chance to try to escape," Lance told Live Science. Now, researchers suggest that a deadly blast wave from the Hunley's own weapon may have killed its crew. The barrel on the end of the 16-foot spar contains 135 pounds of black powder. Hunley as it appeared just before its encounter with the Union ship Housatonic, which it sunk. A graphic reconstruction of the eight-man submarine H.L.
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