And of course, a meteor leaves a crater, and craters were not detected, even using satellite imagery, at places this desert glass was discovered. Further, meteor glass generally takes the form of beads rather than smooth, expansive sheets. Except, while a meteor strike may be able to melt sand into glass, it leaves fragments of iron and other minerals not found in the pure glass of Libya or elsewhere. So, what is this strange desert glass, rediscovered by accident in New Mexico but existing all over the world, and what could have caused it?Īt first, scientists offered meteors as an explanation. Egyptians used it in jewelry, most famously in the pectoral of Pharaoh Tutankhamun – ‘King Tut,’ as he is nicknamed – while paleolithic-era humans used it in tools some 10,000 years ago. Or, perhaps re discovered would be a better way to put it, since the glass appears to have been known about by the ancients. Most unbelievably, a monumental deposit of this desert glass covering an unbelievable 2500 square miles, has been discovered in Libya. Similar glass has also been found in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and along the ancient Silk Road in China, at a site which has become known as the ‘Chinese Roswell,’ as well as in Israel, where a quarter-inch thick deposit of this glass was found spanning several hundred square feet in 1952. In southern Iraq, a layer of glass was discovered deep in the earth during an excavation, under the Babylonian, Sumerian, and Neolithic strata, that is, in the geologic era right before cavemen. The dunes of Egypt, however, are far from the only place on earth where this so-called desert glass has been found. Clayton and his team were puzzled – what could have caused this unusual phenomenon? A decade before the start of the Manhattan Project, they could not envision the type of force required to turn an ocean of sand into glass. Stopping to examine the situation, Clayton discovered that he and his team were driving on great sheets of greenish glass buried just under the sand the crunching noise originating as the weight of the vehicle cracked and broke the glass into chunks beneath them. As they drove, Clayton began to notice a curious noise emanating from under the vehicle, some sort of crunching sound from the tires entirely inconsistent with the usual noise made driving on sand. In 1932, Patrick Clayton and a team from the Egyptian Geological Survey were driving through the dunes of the Great Sand Sea, close to the Saad Plateau in Egypt. But wait, he quickly calculated, if an atomic bomb had created Trinitite in the New Mexico desert, then what he’d seen in Africa must have been created by something thousands of times more powerful. From the recesses of his mind came a memory long since suppressed of something similar he had seen decades earlier in the African desert decades earlier. Shortly after the test, one scientist had a moment of déjà vu while examining the Trinitite glass. Members of the project team, believing this radioactive glass to be a unique, brand-new material found nowhere else on earth, took the opportunity to name it ‘ Trinitite ,’ after the Trinity Test.Įxcept, what if they had it wrong? What if Trinitite wasn’t a unique material found nowhere else on earth? This meant the bomb had produced temperatures of over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is needed to melt silica sand into glass. Much to the surprise of scientists and onlookers, inside of the crater, the rough New Mexico sand had been turned into a smooth sheet of shimmering green glass. In the detonation zone, the bomb left a 300-foot crater five feet deep in the earth. A few weeks later, it would effectively end World War II when nuclear bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with horrifying consequences.įor all those who bore witness to the Trinity Test, it was an extraordinary, life-changing sight to behold, a 40,000-foot high mushroom cloud billowing up to the heavens. The test effectively ended the race between the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union to develop just such an unstoppable weapon, a race ran in hidden laboratories and isolated locales across the world since the 1930s, the culmination of the life’s work of some of the greatest minds on earth. This was the Trinity Test, the culmination of the infamous ‘Manhattan Project’ started by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 with a goal of weaponizing nuclear energy. In the morning on July 16, 1945, at a remote location somewhere deep in the desolate New Mexico desert, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |