re: About Krakatoa: first person reports

quote:

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If you had a surfboard made of diamonds could you theoretically surf a lava flow?

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Go turn on your cooktop/range full tilt. Put your hand over it to determine how high your hand is over the flame before it gets uncomfortably hot. Now imagine that instead of being 200 degrees, your range is 2,000 degrees. Whether the surface you are on survives becomes irrelevant if you cook alive on top of it.

Even if you wore something heat proof, lava flows are too slow to surf on.

And hypothetically, if you found one moving fast enough to surf on, the coefficient of friction of lava is staggeringly higher than that of water, and you would be thrown into the molten drink pretty much instantly as you would have zero control.

And that’s enough thinking for me on this Covid infected Monday morning