Human Shadow Etched in Stone
Art/historic exposition related to the Hiroshima WWII atomic bombing
Human Shadow Etched in Stone (人影の石, hitokage no ishi) is an exhibition at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It is thought to be the shadow of a person who was sitting at the entrance of Hiroshima Branch of Sumitomo Bank when Little Boy was exploded over the city. It is also known as Human Shadow of Death or simply the Blast Shadow.
Background
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the Little Boy atomic bomb was detonated at an altitude of 1,968 ± 50 feet (600 ± 15 m) over the city of Hiroshima, near the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. Among its other effects, it subjected the ground area to extremely high radiant temperatures for several seconds (higher than 1800 °C/3270 °F for less than 4 seconds). Because the duration of this high-temperature burn was so short, it did not have time to diffuse or be dissipated by thermal diffusion. This meant that the immediate surfaces of affected objects were raised to a very high temperature while very little temperature rise occurred beneath their surfaces. After the war, investigators named this the flash burn effect. The angles of the burns, and the specific changes to the surfaces, were closely studied, as they could be used to precisely determine explosion parameters such as the exact altitude, height of burst, and size of fireball.
Throughout Hiroshima (and Nagasaki), "shadows" were found where an intervening object had shielded some part of a surface that was otherwise scorched by direct, line-of-sight heat radiation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Human Shadow Etched in Stone” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.