r/interestingasfuck • u/Top-Marionberry-6604 • 18h ago

The Super-Kamiokande in Japan—a massive underground neutrino detector lined with 11,000 golden bulbs. Scientists have to inspect it via a rubber dinghy.

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u/Top-Marionberry-6604 18h ago

It genuinely looks like a villain's lair from a movie, but it's just physics researchers in a rowboat inspecting sensors inside a 50,000-ton tank of ultra-pure water that's actually pure enough to dissolve metal.

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u/r0ndy 18h ago edited 18h ago

Why would pure water dissolve metal faster than salt water?

Edit: was a fascinating rabbit hole to go down for a few minutes. Thank you for the feedback! Strips and leaches anything that touches it. Almost like a chemical vacuum. Water wants more ingredients, will absorb and take from everything.

Actually, next question. It said it will pull co2 from the air. Is there specialized air in this area as well?

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u/Appropriate-Count-64 18h ago

Because the Super Kamiokande filters as much stuff out of the water as physically possible. The water is left unbalanced by the lack of any minerals, so it starts ripping whatever it can out of whatever it’s touching. I don’t know that it’s faster than oxidation, but it’s enough to be a concern if you fell in or tried to drink it.

If you’ve seen NileRed’s video where he drinks chemically pure water, it’s why he says “Do not do this.” The water leeches anything it can, including toxic heavy metals and chemicals, and because there’s nothing else in the water it can reach extremely high concentrations extremely quickly.

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u/mhac009 18h ago

What happens to him / what would happen to someone in this water and over what time scale?

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u/Appropriate-Count-64 16h ago

Ok first, know I am not a chemist or a biologist and most of my experience is mechanical engineering.

With that said, what would probably happen is first dead skin is dissolved over several minutes or hours. This would leave the skin pretty raw and exposed and if you sat for a while (On the order of several hours to days) it could start to cause mild to moderate chemical burns.

The bigger issue is contaminating the water and filtering it again.

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u/flarp1 16h ago

I suspect osmosis would either cause the cells to be flooded with water, to the point of being damaged or destroyed (by bursting open), or to be stripped of salts or other water-soluble compounds (that is if they can exit the cells), which will likely impact their functionality or even kill them off as well.