Water is famous for extinguishing fires, but now scientists think they have shown how it can cause one.
They investigated what the phenomena of ‘Will-O’-the-Wisp ‘could cause in Moerasland, the spooky lights thought they are spirits or spirits in folklore, who attract walkers to their death.
A mechanism behind Fire Has been discussed for a while. The most common theory is that it is due to methane gas of rotting plants in the marshy ecosystem that catches light in one way or another, but exactly how that happened has not been clear.
Now theoretizes a new paper that could be due to ‘microlighting’ in bubbles in the dark water.
This is suggested to happen when bubbles of methane and air in the water work on top of each other. While the bubbles rise to the surface, some can become positive and some negatively charged.
If the opposite charged bubbles then merge, this may be enough to create a sufficient spark to ignite methane gas that burns with a blue flame.
Study author Richard Zare told New scientist: ‘We continue to discover things about water that, once you understand them, they are clear, but before that time they seem completely bizarre.
‘Nobody thinks of water related to fire. They think water is shining fire. They don’t tell you with water, I can get a spark and set something on fire. This is new. ‘
Now of course we do not say that you have to worry about racking your house by washing the dishes.
For the most part, water is still the Go to for Fire Fighting (except if it is an electric fire: don’t tip it to a burning hairdryer.)
But in very specific cases the researchers say it can have this surprising capacity.
Professor Zare, from Stanford University, had already seen small drops of water that create sparks after building the leadership, so wanted to build on this by looking at whether something similar could explain the Wil-Othe-Wispher idea.
They used an underwater mouth to steer microbelles of methane mixed with air, using a sensitive camera, as well as a photo counter and spectrometer, to record when the bubbles collided.
The study out: “Under dense bubbling circumstances, short, localized flashes were observed between adjacent bubbles.”
They added that this “offers a natural inflammatory mechanism for methane oxidation under environmental conditions. This discovery supports a long-laid connection between electrified interfaces and spontaneous cool flames’.
Exactly what Will-O-the-Wisp is, is still a mystery, not least because they now seem to appear much less now that bills in Folklore would suggest that they did that earlier.
Other mechanisms have also been brought forward, such as bioluminisence or interaction with phosphine produced by bacteria.
Or again, it might have just been spirits all the time.
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