Strange Brick Icicles

Brickcicles?
I like hidden or abandoned places. with the "brickcicle" thing that makes it more interesting.

i think it was actually the mortar, not the bricks that melted. very cool though.

Ya know, it looks more like water seepage dissolving the morter and forming stalagtites. The story doesn't make sense. Also the wording "are apparently the result" is a little suspicious.

I thought that when exposed to very rapid heating bricks tend to spall off their outer surface, not melt.

The photos remind me of lava tubes (caves). Lavacicles look very similar, but aren't usually so tightly packed.

I don't think water will dissolve mortar. If you look at the fourth picture down, you can tell clearly that the bricks ARE melting (top right in the photo).

Clearly, these aren't fireplace bricks (which have very high melting point).

AJ: I know exactly what you're talking about. I was going to comment that these formations look very much like the ones in Ape Cave south of Mt. Saint Helens, which is a lava tube.
I found some pics of Ape Cave 'lavacicles' here:
http://bruceandtina.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-papi-visits-ii-ape-cave.html
And some from Mushpot lava caves here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lavacicles_8238.jpg

In short, I have no doubts at all that something as horribly flammable as napalm in a small area like a Russian fortress tunnel would indeed melt anything it damn well pleased...

Take a better look at the pictures, zoso. The bricks have melted.

Well, bricks can melt, but in order for them not to explode they'd have to be dry or brought up in temp slowly enough to drive the water off without turning it to steam.

Secondly, if those bricks had melted, the sides of the cavern wouldn't be as rough as they are.

Sorry.

also, icicles?
don't ya mean stalactites?

Heat rises, so it's possible for the ceiling to melt and the walls to stay fine, esp. depending on how much heat was released over what period of time. . . The type of brick, if they used a different type of bricks for the ceiling and the walls. . . There's a lot of factors we don't know in this equation. We don't even know what they were testing. Maybe they were testing new meltable ceiling bricks.

To be honest in the third picture on the site, the walls do look melted. . .

It does look like a kind of strange place to test napalm like substances, I'll admit. . .

But I like the idea of bricks melting, and I don't really see anything to the contrary that convinces me the bricks DIDN'T really melt. . .

So,

Neat! Melted bricks! That looks very nifty. I wish I could do that to the ceilings in my underground napalm testing site! It's a charming effect. :D

I agree with Attilla: Looks more like stalagtites. Commonly found in caves and old cellars and such.

I think this isn't from napalm. The Russians developed thermobaric weapons for use against caves and the like. They are different from napalm and are perhaps even more nasty.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon

The term thermobaric is derived from the Greek words for “heat” and “pressure”: thermobarikos (????????????), from thermos (??????), hot + baros (?????), weight, pressure + suffix -ikos (-????), suffix -ic.

A thermobaric weapon (or solid fuel-air explosive) uses the gaseous products (H2, H2O, CO and CO2) of an initial explosion for an afterburning of reactive solids. Because their reaction with atmospheric oxygen only produces solid oxides the blast wave is primarily generated by heat of combustion ("thermobaric") instead of expanding explosion gases. This makes thermobaric explosives more effective in oxygen deficient environments such as tunnels, caves or underground bunkers.

Rather than providing protection as they would from conventional explosive ammunition, structure interior walls, particularly cement or other hard surfaces, magnify and channel the shockwaves created by a thermobaric detonation. The stronger the walls, the higher the pressure’s reflective effect. The turbulent mixing of fuel with ambient oxygen is induced by the presence of walls through enhanced mixing from three different types of instabilities as well as from enhanced chemistry from temperature and pressure velocity gradient in differing fuels,creating a piston type afterburn reaction in enclosed structures.

Unlikely explanation:

Maybe they used unfired clay bricks. Those would melt readily.