As an anthropology student studying nuclear weapons, Martin Pfeiffer has gotten up close and personal with a lot of strange objects. He’s examined preflight controllers. He’s cozied up to bomb casings. (Sometimes he even licks them.)
But one of his favorites is a small rock that he got from a friend just before he started his Ph.
D. studies at the University of New Mexico. It’s a tiny piece of trinitite, a unique, glassy mineral forged in the blast of the first atomic test. His relationship with it is complex: he’s glad he has it, but at the same time, he says, “one of my deepest desires is that nothing like it is ever created again.”Over the past few years, Pfeiffer has come to realize that he is not alone. Trinitite is polarizing: in his studies, he has come across people who collect it eagerly and people who refuse to touch it entirely; people who study it scientifically and people who sell chunks of it by the side of the road. “Trinitite has a way of concretizing, or creating a link with, the heritage of the first atomic bomb,” says Pfeiffer. “And that can have a lot of stuff attached to it.”
Geologically, trinitite is fairly straightforward. When scientists detonated the first atomic test bomb—nicknamed Trinity—in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert in July of 1945, the massive explosion threw sand up into the air, where it was liquified instantly by the heat of the blast. By the time it cooled down again, it wasn’t sand anymore: it had reformed into glassy chunks, most an oceanic green.
Researchers dreamed up a few different names for it—“atomsite,” or “Alamogordo glass,” after the town near the test—but “trinitite” is the one that stuck.Culturally, this is one of the weirdest materials we’ve got. Very soon after it was created, it was marshaled for rhetorical purposes—purposes, Pfeiffer says, that it has served ever since. “At the end of the day, trinitite is radioactive fallout,” he says. “But we gave it a pretty name.”
Trinitite.
Took years of brilliant effort, engineering, & 2 billion in 1945 dollars but a rare new mineral was made pic.twitter.com/eBMMLpCHYE— Martin Pfeiffer
The post The Long, Weird Half-Life of Trinitite appeared first on FeedBox.