On July 16, the US tested the world’s first atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, near the town of Alamogordo. The test was nicknamed ‘Trinity’. The intense heat produced by the massive detonation instantly liquefied the sand. When it cooled down, the sand in the 730-m wide crater had turned into chunks of jade-green glass.
The glass was in strange forms – uneven marbles, knobbed sheets, thin valled bubbles and wormlike ribbons. Known as trinitite, atom site or Alamogordo glass, it was mildly radioactive but safe to handle.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when nuclear bombs were no longer a secret, reporters were shown around the test site. They pocketed the bits of crater glass as souvenirs. Later, with the general public allows in for two days a year, the trinitite began to vanish. It showed up in souvenir shops and even as jewellery.
The army belatedly bulldozed the site in 1952 and made it illegal to collect the trinitite. However, the mineral is still traded online with collectors paying big sums for pieces which contain melted copper or iron from the site.
Picture Credit : Google