• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Trinitite Is Atomic Rock Forged By The Fireballs Of Nuclear Bombs

March 24, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

If you want to make trinitite, all you need is a few things: a bucket of sand and the intense heat of a thermonuclear weapon. Scientists first noticed this strange green-red glass after dropping some of the very first atomic bombs in the dying days of War World Two. As it turned out, this material was even stranger than they first realized. 

In the early morning of July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated near Alamogordo in the dusty desert of New Mexico, shooting an 11,500-meter (~38,000-foot) mushroom cloud into the air. When the blast site was investigated, people noticed that a never-before-seen glassy material had been left behind like residue.

Advertisement

They called it trinitite after the code name for the first atomic bomb blast, Trinity, although it also goes by the name Alamogordo glass. It’s largely made of silicate dioxide embedded with melted quartz grain and feldspar, as well as a sprinkling of other minerals like calcite, hornblende, and augite.

Trinitite was formed by sand that had been melted by the unbelievable amount of heat energy kicked out by the bomb. By one estimate, it rose the air temperature at its core to approximately 4,982 degrees Celsius (9,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The blast would have sprayed heaps of sand into the sky, cooking it in an atomic fireball, before letting into rain down as a liquid. Once it reached the ground, it cooled and formed this crystal-like glass.

Mushroom cloud from the Trinity nuclear atomic bomb blast in New Mexico.

Trinitite can feature an array of colors – namely grey, green, and red – and it’s been speculated that each hue is caused by the different materials in the bomb itself, as well as the various radionuclides formed during the detonation. Green trinitite may have been formed by material from the bomb’s shell, while red trinitite may stem from copper electrical wiring. 

As such, scientists have floated the idea of using trinitite as forensic evidence to understand the composition and origin of nuclear bombs. 

Advertisement

Similar melted glass materials can be naturally made with other displays of fierce energy, such as meteorites and lightning strikes, but trinitite is characterized as its own district material that’s only created by atomic bomb blasts. 

It’s considered mildly radioactive, although not enough to cause too much concern. Trinitite could even be found at the Trinity site as late as 2018, despite the clean-up efforts of the US Atomic Energy Commission that bulldozed the area in the 1950s.

In yet another strange twist to the tale of trinitite, scientists have recently discovered that it has an extremely unusual atomic structure containing “forbidden” quasicrystals.

A typical crystal refers to a material that has atoms that are symmetrically ordered in a periodic, repeating pattern. However, quasicrystals have atoms that are still ordered but the pattern is not repeated. This results in a bizarre asymmetric and non-repeating atomic structure that’s not seen in typical crystals and is known as “forbidden symmetry“. 

Advertisement

Quasicrystals are known to be formed by meteorites and in labs, but it appears that atomic blasts also pack enough punch. 

When quasicrystals were first identified in the 1980s by Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli materials scientist, he was showered with criticism and mockery, but his discovery eventually landed him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Warren says Fed must break up ‘repeat offender’ Wells Fargo
  2. Colosseum kits and plastic flowers help Lego’s earnings double
  3. Bills sign CB Taron Johnson to 3-year extension
  4. Origin Of Mysterious Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis Illness In Children Identified

Source Link: Trinitite Is Atomic Rock Forged By The Fireballs Of Nuclear Bombs

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Impact That Made Meteor Crater May Have Triggered Giant Grand Canyon Landslide
  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version