One intrepid soul set out to see what exactly what would happen if the One Ring from “The Lord Of The Rings” was actually thrown in lava. We know in the movie it melts, saving the day and essentially the future of Middle-Earth. But is that what would really happen? Kyle Hill set to find out and the results were a little more daunting than the happy ending written into the story.
To melt like the movie, the temperature would have to be less than 1200 degrees. Kyle flew to Syracuse University, to use their lava lab to test whether or not the ring could have been destroyed. He had a gold plated titanium replica of the One Ring, similar to the iconic ring forged in the fires of Mount Doom.
Hill throws it into the lava much more daintily than Frodo, but relieves himself of his precious none-the-less. After the lava hardened they started to break it apart in search of the ring. After searching for it like a needle in a haystack, he found the lava which contained the precious piece of jewelry.
After finding the ring, Hill explains what happened during the process of it cooling and preserving it.
“What happened, well according to Dr. Carson, what happens is if the ring is at a different temperature than the surrounding lava, lava will cover the ring even though the ring might not sink down into it because the densities are different. The ring will sink into the lava and the lava will cover the ring but then a layer around it will almost instantly cool. Now this cooled bit of lava acts as a fantastic insulator such that the rest of the lava can flow around it but it remains encased.”
This would be an even more grim way of destroying the ring. Imagine that it’s just lying in wait for the next person to dig it up. Scary!
