What if we fell into a pool of liquid Mercury?

 Author: Lisha Patil

Nowadays, even children know that mercury is incredibly dangerous, but it wasn't always so, until the middle of the last century, people took mercury as a cure for many diseases! Fortunately, those days are gone, and today you must be extremely careful when working with this metal, what happens if a drop of mercury gets on your skin? No, it's something even worse.. what if you were submerged in a pond of liquid mercury.
Today, you will learn how truly dangerous mercury really is, and it's terrible effects on the Human body.

Let's start by filling an entire lake with a huge amount of liquid mercury and put a swimmer there. Want to see if they can survive, and what exactly will happen to them? Let the experiment begin, but don't even think of trying this at home, if you've ever smashed a mercury thermometer, you must've seen shiny silver balls. Sure mercury is extracted in a completely different form, like other metals, it's extracted from ore, mostly from Cinnabar. In general, mercury content in the Earth's crust is small, only 0.08g per ton, this is why mercury is an extremely rare element. The liquid form of this metal forms from its vapor, which when cooled, turns to liquid. Then the mercury is packed in cast iron or steel flasks, each one weighing 34.5kg.

But, enough about mercury, let's move on to practice, let's fill the entire lake with elemental mercury, let's not joke around, the lake being about the size of an Olympic pool. How much mercury will we need? given that this metal is more than 13.5x denser than water, we'll need a lot, a little less than a Million flasks to be precise. Well, the lake is filled and shimmers in the sun like silver, it's better not to jump in from a hill. Jumping from a height into a mercury pool would be worse than falling onto a concrete floor. If you jump from the shore, it will also e unpleasant. At a minimum, you'll get some bruises… Mercury is so dense that you can't even be submerged in it by a couple of centimeters or inches, but you'll probably be able to stand on the mercury lake. It's better to hone your balance skill to perfection in advance because just standing on mercury will not be easy. Not to mention taking a step to get out of it by yourself will also be a problem. It would be better to tie a rope to a tree before the experiment to pull yourself ashore.

By the way, mercury has a high surface tension, therefore it wouldn't stick to your body. But, in any case, poisoning from vapors can happen, this is because mercury has the properties of a neurotoxin, which means that even small doses of it can cause great harm to human health.

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