I’ve seen a number of videos recently of people restoring very rusted objects, like toys and an anceint historical knife, where the rust seems to have eaten most of the metal. However, after restoration, the object seems good as new and don’t seem to have lost any significant amount of mass even though you’d expect there to be nothing left. How is this even possible?
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Rust is very unreactive so the rust coating the metal object actually begins to protect the rest of it, so even something “heavily rusted” is only a few atoms deep into the item (indeed something like aluminium oxide forms a layer that’s usually only one or two atoms thick and is extremely unreactive, protecting aluminium from corrosion). There are lots and lots of layers of atoms in an object of any appreciable mass so they don’t lose very much at all when they get cleaned up.
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