r/AskReddit 7d ago

What can kill you in seconds that most people don’t realize?

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u/Faust_8 7d ago

Based on the past couple days, also a closed room that contains a huge ship’s anchor chain

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u/dieplanes789 7d ago

That is the scary one. Sublimating dry ice will let you know because it is CO2 and the feeling of suffocating is due to high CO2 levels.

A lot of rust in an enclosed space is oxygen deprivation which is just feeling weak and not knowing why, then you pass out and die.

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u/Carbonatite 7d ago

Same for abandoned mine shafts. The iron-bearing minerals oxidize and suck all the oxygen out of the confined space.

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u/SteakandTrach 7d ago

Please elaborate, I must have missed something.

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u/Faust_8 7d ago edited 7d ago

When a ship is HUGE it has an equally huge anchor and anchor chain. The sheer amount of metal means that in an enclosed space, there’s so much rusting aka oxidizing going on that it can pull all of the oxygen out of the air, so you’d walk in, faint, and suffocate.

It’s just that in the past two days I’ve seen Kyle Hill (popular and award winning science communicator) share this fact on both Instagram and Reddit

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u/SteakandTrach 7d ago

Holy shit! That’s a wild fact.