What caused the lakes in New York state?
New York state is riddled with almost a thousand big and little lakes, The waterways are dotted with far more than a thousand pint¬sized islands. All this embroidery in the ground was done by the mighty glaciers of the Ice Ages. At one time, only a small corner 3n the western part of the state was free from the weighty glaciers.
The vast ice fields, perhaps a mile or more thick, pushed over the ground like monster bulldozers. The mountain peaks were pared down into rounded hills. The valleys were gouged deeper and deep holes were scooped from the soft plains. Later many of these holes filled with water to give us the beautiful lake system of New York state.
What happens when an atom bursts?
It takes about 100 million medium sized atoms to measure an inch. Compared with a single atom, a pinhole is a giant. So letis magnify them both until the pinhole is a mile wide. The atom is now the size of an ordinary pinhole. This one little atom, of course, cannot burst and blow up the world.
When a single atom bursts, it can shoot off enough energy to lift a drop of water about half an inch. The furious explosion of the atomic bomb comes from countless trillions of exploding atom's. They are radioactive atoms, each one a tiny time bomb, triggered to burst at a certain time.
The atom is made of small particles of matter and, we are told, matter is energy in a sort of frozen state. When a radioactive atom bursts, or loses one or more of its particles, some of its matter is turned into energy. Its lost particles stream forth with furious speed and the original atom becomes an atom of something else.
The explosion takes place in the nucleus, the dense wad of protons and neutrons. The nature of an atom depends upon the number of its protons. The uranium atom has 92, the radium has 88 protons. In a pinch of radium, millions of atoms burst every second. Alpha particles stream forth at 10,000 miles a second, fast enough to pierce a sheet of paper,
An alpha particle is a wad of two protons and two neutrons. And a radium atom that loses two neutrons becomes radon gas. Beta rays also stream from the radioactive radium. They are streaming electrons which may reach the speed of light, fast enough to pierce a book.
Gamma radiation also streams forth and the radium glows with heat energy. The gamma rays are electromagnetic energy, somewhat like pow¬erful Xrays, and we need a sheet of lead to stop them. When an atom bursts, it shoots off high speed particles and some of its matter is turned into energy.
A bursting atom loses just one or a few of its many particles and a mere trace of its total energy. This energy is locked in the nucleus of the atom and we would need to shatter all its nuclear particles to release the total energy. If we could do this, we would have the last word in economical fuels. An ounce of this radioactive fuel would release enough energy to take a great liner several times around the world.
Outside the nucleus of the atom, far outside, are the tiny electron particles. The number of electrons is equal to the number of protons in the nucleus, but ninety nine and nine tenths of the weight of the atom is centered in the nucleus. If we could strip off all the electrons and pack the nuclei close together, we would have a very dense and heavy substance. A marble made of this weighty stuff would weigh about a billion tons.