Explore "The Winning of the Moon" by Kris Neville on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
During the fifteen-minute wait before they dared venture back, Capt. Wilkins, interrupted once by what appeared to be a moderately mild after-shock from the previous moonquake, explained the phenomena they had just observed.
"A room-temperature-curing epoxy liberates heat during its curing reaction. And the hotter it is when you mix it, the faster it reacts. The drum had been absorbing heat out here for several hours much faster than it could radiate it away. It may have been forty or fifty degrees C when we stirred in the curing agent. At that temperature, a pound mass will normally kick over in five or ten minutes. But here, the only way it can lose the reaction heat is by the slow process of radiation. And that means as the heat builds up, the epoxy goes faster and faster, building up even more heat. And furthermore, we're not talking about a pound, which can maybe get up to 250 C. in air. We're talking about 500 pounds, liberating five hundred times as much heat as one pound, and getting God knows how hot -- "