Though it sounds mystical, but there is one very real object so deadly that even looking at it could take your breath away.
300 seconds in the room with ‘Elephant’s Foot‘ will leave you dead in with just two days.
Elephant’s Foot is a 2m wide lump of solidified lava formed from the molten core of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
Due to the intense radiation, only a handful of photos of the Elephant’s foot have ever been taken.
Even now, almost 40 years since the meltdown, stepping into the room with this object could be deadly and the threat may persist for centuries to come.
How Elephant’s Foot Was Formed
On April 26, 1986 reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine experienced an unexpected power surge.
When emergency shutdown procedures failed the temperatures in the core rose even higher.
By the time the control rods which slow the reaction were inserted, it was too late and the intense temperatures cracked the rods.
Soon the cooling water vapourised, building up pressure until the reactor itself exploded in the worst nuclear disaster in human history.
That Autumn, as emergency crews fought to contain the radiation they discovered a chamber beneath the reactor had become one of the most dangerous places on the planet.
The reactor became so hot that the steel and concrete used to shield the core melted into radioactive lava.
Despite what the initial clean-up crews believed this material wasn’t actually nuclear fuel from the reactor.
As the core became critical it simply melted the materials used to house it which slowly fell through the floor of the reactor.
As it forced its way through the pipes and concrete of Reactor 4 the material picked up more components, changing and morphing into a complex mess of radioactive chemicals.
When this mixture of sand, concrete and nuclear fuel finally cooled down it solidified into a new material called corium.
How the Name ‘Elephant’s Foot’ Was Coined
One mass of corium, which fell through into the steam corridor beneath the reactor, became known as the Elephant’s Foot due to its distinctive shape.
In 1986, the elephant’s foot was putting out 10,000 roentgens (a measure of radiation) per hour – around 1,000 times the dose required to give you cancer.
Radiation Level of Elephant’s Foot Will Leave You Dead
For context, an hour of radiation at that level would be the equivalent of getting four and a half million chest X-rays.
In 30 seconds of exposure, you would be left with dizziness and fatigue within a week.
After two minutes in the room, your cells would begin to haemorrhage and at four minutes vomiting, diarrhoea, and fever would set in.
Finally, after just five minutes you would almost certainly die two days later.
As the clean-up crew, called ‘liquidators’, arrived they found that the Elephant’s Foot was still far too radioactive to approach.
