How much glass, if any, would be generated by a nuclear blast in the desert? The idea seems a bit dubious to me.
When we conducted the Trinity atomic bomb test, it was in a desert. And it turns out that yes, it does turn the sand to glass. Sort of. Here’s the American Heritage definition for trinitite.
Douglas Coupland has a few paragraphs about it in his book Generation X, or you can just google for “trinitite”.
My grad school had a chunk of that in a storage room - it was an oddly shaped lump of greenish glass about a meter in length. I always meant to test it with a geiger counter but never got around to it.
-
-
- Well this page:
http://www.minresco.com/trinitite/trin.htm
shows the trinitite distribution, and you can see it was only a few hundred meters across, for an atomic bomb on the ground. So it obviously takes a lot of heat to melt sand like this.
…
I have done it with a welding torch just for the heck of it, and you have to hold an oxygen-rich torch flame on regular brown sand for as long as 8-10 minutes just to get the sand to even begin to stick together. Once you do get it melted into a blob and cooled however, it is EXTREMELY hard.
…
- Well this page:
-
- And, you can buy the stuff! Who woulda thunk it? I’d have guessed it would be radioactive, but I guess not, or at least, -not that much, anyway.
~
So what about the Hydrogen Bombs in the Pacific? Were all the islands blown up turned to chunks of glass? Bigger bombs more heat?
The sand in Nevada turned to a glass because it was mostly quartz in composition (commercial glass is basically pure quartz melted and rapidly cooled so that it has a disordered crystal structure).
In contrast, the atolls used for hydrogen bomb tests were made largely of carbonate sand and reefs, i.e. limestone. To my knowledge, no one’s gone back to sample what’s left of the atolls. Since hydrogen bombs are more powerful than the fission blasts in Nevada, I suspect that that limestone vaporized wherever it was in close proximity to the blast; further away it could have recrystallized from the heat, but it wouldn’t have formed a glass.
[QUOTE=sunfish]
The sand in Nevada turned to a glass because it was mostly quartz in composition (commercial glass is basically pure quartz melted and rapidly cooled so that it has a disordered crystal structure).
QUOTE]
[Absolute total hijack] Speaking of disordered structures, I read an article in the LA Times (I think) that the latest in high-strength, high corrosion resistant, high fatigue resistant materials is metal having disordered crystal structures. In essence glasses with metal atoms.
Any metallugists who know about this - a cite to an explanatory site would be appreciated. [/Absolutely total hijack]
David Simmons - I googled “metallic glass” and found some university press releases and the like. Not the most in-depth explanations in the world, granted, but here are a few things to start with:
Metallic glass - material of the future?
Metallic glass throws off sparks
Microstructuring of bulk metallic glass by hot mold quenching
I’d never heard about these before you mentioned them, but they do sound pretty neat. 
Apparently an enormous amount of "desert glass’ has been generated by meteor strikes (or perhaps near misses). See what a google search finds:
http://www.google.com/search?q=“desert+glass”+%2Bmeteor
Course Star Trek got there first, transparent aluminium from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home 
Aye laddie, there is that. But transparent aluminum might be made by making it porous but not changing the crystal structure. What Mr. Simmons was asking for… now there’s a neat bit of work.
Semi Hijack
Lightning strikes can also turn sand to glass. The resulting substance is fulgurite. Fulgurite is brittle and must be dug out very carefully. If you can keep it whole, it looks exactly the way you’d expect lightning sculpted in glass to look. Here in Philly, The Academy Of Natural Sciences Museum has a piece on display. Sadly, they don’t have it on their website. I’ve found numerous sites selling fragments, but these don’t look remotely as impressive.
http://www.schoolersinc.com/fulgurites.htm
Has some decent fragments.
Semi Hijack Pt. 2
I believe it was at Snow Canyon (Utah?) that a layer of volcanics were deposited on top of a quartz rich sandstone and the heat from the lava turned the top foot or so of the sandstone to glass. Very cool metamorphosis captured for all to see.
While that’s the only example I’ve seen personally, the scenario seems so likely that I can’t imagine it not being present in more locales.
Here you go:
http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-04/features/glassy-metals/?page=2
Sounds like more reverse-engineered technology from the Roswell crash being released to the marketplace, if you ask me… 
lieu, that kind of metamorphism is called contact metamorphism, and it is indeed pretty common in environments where molten rock is erupted onto the landscape or intruded into older rocks. The process by which the material undergoing contact metamorphism to a glass is called vitrification.
Wish I could remember the exact location, but there are some excellent examples of vitrification of volcanic ash deposits by later magmatic intrusions in road cuts south of Las Vegas. There the ash is light-colored and somewhat crumbly where it hasn’t been altered, getting progresively darker and glassier as you move toward the intrusion. (And let me tell you, shards of the glassy stuff do cut more sharply than any steel knife! It’s not a wonder that surgeons sometimes use obsidian, a volcanic glass, for scalpel blades.)
Ah cool, toadspittle, thanks. What do you think inspired the release now…?