I remember how someone would light firecrackers and they would go off underwater. Along with torpedos and sea mines (I forget the term)
Just something that never crossed my mind as to how things like that would happen and people here would know. Thanks!
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Explosives and gunpowder always “carry” their own oxygen supply. One of the chemical compounds in the mix will release oxygen when heated or reacted. In that sense the explosive doesn’t need oxygen from the air to work and therefore will work underwater (or in space, for that matter)
Fire needs oxygen to burn, which it draws from the air.
Air can only move so fast though, so even *above* water you can’t suck up enough oxygen quickly enough to make most things explode.
That means explosives have to bring their own oxidizers with them. They’re a mixture of volatile chemicals that react at incredible speed under the right ignition conditions to cause the explosion. This will happen on land, under water, or on the moon because they have all the reaction components already packed up.
You will probably need to keep them dry to get it to work underwater though.
Explosives are different from flammables.
A flammable, like gasoline, needs a source of oxygen and ignition to burn.
An explosive, like TNT, has the oxidizer already mixed with the fuel in a semi-stable chemical compound. All it needs is a source of ignition.
† The chemistry is a bit more complex, but this isn’t flared Chemistry.
Explosives do not use oxygen from the atmosphere. It would take too long for the oxygen to get mixed with the fuel to burn. Explosions happens in milliseconds. In order to do this the oxidizer needs to be in the explosive itself. So explosives are a mix of a fuel and an oxidizer which will react to each other when compressed. This means that the explosives will be able to detonate under water as it does not need any oxygen from the air.
The same way they go off above water. Unlike fire, explosives do not need oxygen for a combustion reaction. Basically because they have oxygen in their chemical structure anyway. Like nitroglycerin is C3H5N3O9, 9 oxygen atoms per molecule, and a couple of nitrogens that really like to not be locked up in another molecule and prefer to form gassy N2 if they can.
Semtex is similar, it’s made of C3H6N6O6. Lots of nitrogen and oxygen in molecule makes boom even underwater.
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