When I was cleaning a heatsink from an older laptop, the aluminum, and I think also a bit of copper, started to disintegrate very quickly and sometimes violently. I used a cleaning solution that was made for removing thermal paste and cleaning CPUs and PCBs. After some time, the only thing left of the heatsink was some grey powder or ash. I have cleaned many heatsinks and CPUs with it before, and this never happened, and I can’t reproduce it.
I would assume that nobody makes thermal paste out of anything terribly reactive, but… That .gif looks like something out of a NileRed video.
IIRC, gallium makes aluminum get super brittle, which might cause it to crumble like that; but the foaming makes me think that the heat sink might have managed to oxidize all the way through, and it’s aluminum oxide reacting with the cleaner.
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