This question is tied to a previous question:
Cataclysmic event resulting in a region of glass?
In this scenario you have two armies, with a combined strength of roughly 30,000 personnel.
Magicians on both sides cast a ritual spell that feeds off the armies to wreak destruction on their enemies (they cast at the same time, it is essentially the same spell with multiple casters.)
The details:
- Everyone dies...they are the source of energy. Average weight is 70.0 kg/humanoid. How much chemical energy is contained in each human?
- The spell heats the ground to a depth of 100 meters at the epicenter, at 100 kilometers the depth is 50 meters and at 200 kilometers the depth is 1 meter (or zero..basically that is how far the spell reaches. For the sake of calculations you can consider the terrain completely flat. (basically the area of affect is a big damn cone)
The heat is sufficient that the ground turns crystalline (pick your substrate, meaning sand, stone etc). The result should be a vast obsidian/glass dead land. (shiny and breakable)
- If anyone can elaborate on the difference in energy requirements for various substrates that is bonus points.
- The effect is instantaneous across the whole area of effect (the heat in the entire cone is exactly the same), the area is heated and cooled just to the point of being solid in the span of 5 seconds, though it must cool down from there naturally.
Questions:
- Is 30,000 humanoids enough to power this spell? If not, how many would it take?
- Does turning the ground crystalline create more or less volume than before the spell was cast? (does the ground contract or expand)
- What sort of effects should be expected from the residual cooling process?
- If chemical energy is insufficient what about the atomic energy in that much matter (how big would the effect be?) per @DanSmolinski 's comment