Steel Rebar Snaps So Fast You Can Barely Even See It, Even in Slow Motion

30,000 frames per second isn't nearly enough.

The Slow Mo GuysYouTube

The last thing you want from a piece of rebar is for it to snap in half. That is, unless you're performing a tensile strength test in which case that's the inevitable result. Here, we see a piece of rebar not only stretched to the limits of what it can stand, but stretched under the watchful eye of a camera that can shoot slow motion footage at speeds of nearly 150,000 frames per second. Still, if you blink, you'll miss the action.

Normally, with a Phantom camera in hand and shooting at tens of thousands of frames per second, the Slow Mo Guys can capture at least a fleeting glimpse of what normally unfolds faster than the eye can see. Take the instant a piece of glass explodes from a drastic and sudden temperature change, for example. Or the very moment a spinning CD explodes into shrapnel. When it comes to the rebar however, super-ultra-slow-mo is hardly even better than real time:

While the actual moment of the split still seems to happen in an instant, the slow-motion footage does show how each half of the beam springs back after it snaps, undoing some of the elastic deformation that occurred during the test. You can also see bits of dust just flying off the bar due to the vibrations caused by the split.

If you actually wanted to capture the fracturing that occurs as the bar splits, you'd need a camera that shoots much faster. The Slow Mo guys guess somewhere around a million frames a second. There's at least one camera out there that can go up to 4 trillion. Let's get it pointed at some steel.

Source: The Slow Mo Guys

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