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If they dropped an atomic bomb in the middle of the desert, would all the sand turn into glass?
"Actually the answer is yes and no.
The temperatures easily get hot enough to melt sand... much hotter in fact.
However, there is so much kinetic energy released (movement, ie shock wave) that the sand can't stick together, as you may have noticed, the shockwave expands as it moves outwards, so this inhibits the sand from becoming a mass of sand...
Other nuclear events that don't involve explosions have yielded large globules of glass.
There is another event that can turn the ground into glass.
Lightning has often been recorded as having turned the ground into glass. A few years back, the Guinness book listed a man that has received 8 lightning strikes. One of the spots he was struck was photographed and you can quite clearly see where the electricity travelled through the ground and turned it into glass. Sandy soil often turns to glass after a lightning strike.
There is a very interesting thing I read a little while back about a big chunk of glass that was found in the middle of nowhere in the middle east... They concluded that it could not have been formed by a normal fire (too large, and the shape was wrong), and was not attributed to lightning either...
Some picked up on the chunk of glass as having been caused by a localized nuclear event.
Some Jews tied it to an occurrence of 'fire from heaven'...
Ticket's still out on that one.. Technology still does not exist today to create that type of lump of glass for the reasons I stated earlier... explosions spread things out. Pretty much guaranteed that no earlier civilizations here had that level of technology either.
I haven't read much about it lately though... Been about 15 years since I read anything about it...
Curious though."
Much obliged to eschelar for answering a question that has been bothering me for years, which no one has ever taken the time to look into.
Check it with google if you are interested!
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