Mark Basile:
Well I think there are some indications of thermitic reaction, potentially. There was a report done by a professor down at WPI. They have a big fire safety group - I think he's involved in that down there - where one of the samples from World Trade Center 7 was sent to him because it did have some uh... funny appearances. There was evidently something very strange that happened to it and uh.. There was some sulfidation. So basically, sections of this steel had been turned molten and had very high sulfur contents in them, along with the iron and the melted steel and so on, so. That's a possible other indicator that there was thermite here, because a lot of times, you know, people who are following this, they hear the term thermite, thermate, and so on. If you integrate sulfur into the thermite mixture you get what's called "thermate" and the reason that's done is, uhm... just like you can alloy steel with say carbon or nickel or chromium to make different, you know, whatevers, you can allow steel with sulphur, and when you do that it actually lowers its melting point significantly so, that's the reason it's used in building demolition type thermites specifically, or for a... further applications too, you know, for destroying equipment, you know like soldiers use this material when they're backing away from equipment and they need to destroy say a tank, but they can't take it with them so the enemy can't use it... They'll drop little thermite hand grenades into their equipment to basically melt through the material and destroy the equipment.
