Good morning John.

Top 10 week has turned up to be quite fun. I hope we do it again sometime. Can you imagine breaking your arm and then stabbing someone with the bone?

But really I think the exploding ant deserved his place at the top of that list, but that got me thinking about the biggest and most awe-inspiring explosions of all time. Number one: The very first large man-made explosion happened in 1654 in the Dutch town of Delft when a 30 ton store of gunpowder exploded. It pretty much destroyed the entire town and kind of created the idea of a bomb.

But really, on the scale of things, not a very big explosion. The second explosion I'm gonna talk about is the largest accidental explosion of all time. It happened outside of the Canadian port of Halifax when 2 boats crashed into each other.

Unfortunately, one of the boats was carrying nothing but explosives for use in World War I. It created a tsunami and killed over 2000 people and pretty much destroyed the entire town of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Number three: The world's second largest explosion before the advent of nuclear weapons was the intentional destruction of an island in the East River so that they could open up the East River to shipping.

Unfortunately, that one was too long ago to have video footage of it, however, there was a similar island destruction in British Columbia in the 1950s, and we do have video of that. Yeah. Explosion number four: The largest explosion before the advent of nuclear weapons killed around 10,000 Germans during World War I.

So the British troops actually dug under the German lines and laid down a huge amount of explosives. The evening before the attack the British general was quoted as saying,"Gentlemen, tomorrow we may not change history, but we certainly will change geography." And before we get to nuclear weapons, cuz we're gonna get there, let's talk about the largest non-nuclear weapon ever designed by the US. The Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb or MOAB is also sometimes called the,"Mother of all bombs." It has roughly the explosive power of 12 tons of TNT and can destroy a 10 city block radius.

And now's when we start making really big jumps. So we go from the MOAB which was a big bang to a much bigger bang, which is a very small nuclear weapon. Fat Man and Little Boy were the only nuclear weapons actually used in warfare.

Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they're roughly 1000 times bigger than the MOAB. Explosion number 7: The Ivy King was the largest fission bomb of all time. Roughly 30 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

There's something in my eye. Explosion number 8: The Tunguska Event happened in 1908 and no one is quite sure what happened. But whatever it was had an explosive force larger than 1000 Hiroshima bombs.

The most prominent theory was that it was a very small comet, not because of atmospheric pressure and the heat of re-entry, it actually exploded before it hit the ground. Explosion number 9: The Tsar Bomb was actually probably like 5 times bigger than the Tunguska Event, which, wow!! The Tsar bomb with a 50 megaton equivalence is roughly the size of 4000 Hiroshima bombs.

Explosion number 10: The largest explosion and fairly recent geological history of the Earth was the volcanic eruption that left behind Yellowstone National Park. For those of you who don't know Yellowstone National Park, one of America's most prized natural wonders, which is a mere 100 miles away from where I'm sitting right now is actually a volcanic caldera. The last time it erupted was 640,000 years ago.

And the force of that explosion was roughly 17,000 times that, not of the Hiroshima bomb, but of the 50 megaton Tsar bomb. The scary part is geologists say Yellowstone is due for another eruption. (whine) Okay, I live I live way too close to this thing. So I hope I freaked you out!

Can you imagine living in a time when there's actually a feasibility of global nuclear war? I don't even live in the '50s and I wanna go build a bomb shelter. If you missed the other two Top 10 videos, you can see them right now.

I'm gonna put an annotation link up. John I will see you on Monday.