For many years I have been collecting Fulgurites. For those who do not know what they are, a fulgurite is the fused sand or rock in the ground from a lightning strike. When lightning striked the ground in a mostly sandy area the sand fused from the heat into a cylindrical glass tube, often taking the shape of the lightning. I have collected several nice samples over the years, most of which I found in the sonoran desert when I lived in AZ. Living in CT, I see lightning strikes ever so often on the beach, and when I am lucky enough to see where the strike was I try and see if I can’t extract the fulgurite formed from the strike. I have not perfected the method of extraction, if there is anyone out there who has a suggestion, I’m all ears!
I saw several strikes last night on our beach…and am planing on going for a little walk today to see if I can find these interesting Fulgurites .
Just like these guys, the best thing is to use the same kind of techniques used to dig up fossils and archeological artifacts. There’s no shortcuts here. It takes a lot of patience and time. Since they can be fairly long and are very delicate, it’s a good idea to have at least one other person to hold and support the near end while you keep digging it out, if you want to get as much of it as possible.
You could try taking a surface core. Get hold of a 4" piece of metal pipe and a big ass hammer/rock. Pound the thing into ground and then lever it out. Take the whole thing home and deal with it there. If you are really keen, slice pipe in two and add hinges/clasps
That would work fine if fulgurites always went straight down into the ground. Unfortunately, they rarely do. Just like in the air, lightning travelling through the ground takes sudden turns, sometimes branches off, and rarely follows a nice, vertical path.
Couldn’t you simply use a good sized gas powered leaf blower to gently and quickly expose beach fulgurites by blowing the sand away, or are they too delicate for this?
This might work for the first several inches or so, depending. Eventually, however, you get down to the water table, and wet sand is a little tough to blow away. They are pretty delicate too. They’re really a hollow, thin-walled tube of flimsy glassy material.
QED - I never knew you were so interested in Fulgurites…My wife and I have several 1" plus fulgurites on display in our home. I won’t say it is a passion of ours, but what could be more cool than finding evidence of a .897 second event in it’s physical form. We have been collecting fulgurites for many years. Having lived in Arizona (one of the lightning capital’s of the US) and in CT, near the coast, we have had plenty of opportunity to find these wonderful lightning creations. We are not in the business of selling them like so many on e-bay, but we do like to display the more intricate, detailed fulgurites.
Today we went to the point where we saw the strike and immediately knew the location, as there was singed dune grass in the vacinity of the fulgurite. Ina ll we left with a 6" specimen which was quite “hardy” in our terminology. Meaning it was not as fragile as some we have found. This was roughly 3/4 inch in diameter and full of white silica looking crystals. In all a good specimen. Whe we clean it up again it will certainly be in our display area.
Astro - we tried the blowing away of material from the fulgurite using a simple computer spray compressed air, with mixed results. We find out best method is to dig a rectangular pit 1 1/2 feet from the sight of impact, if we can see it, and dig down roughly one meter. The start digging towards the impact sight with a small smooth edge spade. Then when we encounter the remnants of the fulgurite, we switch to using a brush…When I get our website up, I’ll post pics.
Since it is a fairly solid tubelike structure in situ (I’ve seen many, but I don’t collect or study them, so the examples I’ve seen might be more pristine, complete or robust than most found in nature), has anyone considered some sort of stabilizing solution that could be injected into the tube to assist in extraction? I often did this in research and teaching, to preserve delicate structures in biological samples
