1/ Twitter being Twitter, I’m seeing misinfo about the horrific Beirut explosion already. We don’t know the source yet, or how many people have been hurt or killed. But, about the explosion itself…

2/ I’ve seen people speculating it’s a nuke. An explosion does NOT have to be nuclear to get a mushroom cloud. The air around an explosion gets hugely heated. Hot air expands in a rough sphere, gets less dense, and becomes buoyant, so it rises.

3/ Cooler air around it gets drawn in underneath by the vacuum left by the suddenly rising air, flows to the center and rises. This creates the mushroom cap. It flattens as it rises, pushing against the cooler air above it.

4/ This can all happen WITHOUT nukes, you just need a sudden burst of heat, so a big conventional explosion can do it as well.

5/ The red color of the cloud is disturbing. It implies some sort of chemical involved, and that means people already hurt by the blast *might* have dangerous stuff in the air they’re breathing. I won’t speculate on what it is. Not my place.

6/ The compression wave from the blast moves out at the speed of sound. It leaves behind less dense air (a rarefaction wave), which cools, causing water vapor to condense, which is why it goes white for a moment and then clears out.

7/ Also, this huge explosion followed a smaller (but still big) one, which is why there’s so much video. People were recording the aftermath of the 1st one when the 2nd one went off.

8/8 This is a terrible, traumatic event and news is still coming out. PLEASE don’t speculate, or spread unsourced/unconfirmed rumors. That makes things harder later for real information to be processed.