TrinititeThis is a unique rock. Just by looking at it, you can sort of make out that it looks like a

TrinititeThis is a unique rock. Just by looking at it, you can sort of make out that it looks like a clast-rich rock, with sand-sized grains that are either colorless or light green. The rock has a shiny luster, reflecting the light of the camera flash, and the rock interestingly also has some large holes in it – seemingly larger than any of the grains in the rock, so they’re probably not gaps left by sediments being plucked out.If you examined the rock close up, you’d find a mixture of surprising minerals to find together, including sand grains that look like both the minerals quartz and olivine, with a bit of feldspar and even some remnant clay. Usually it’s not possible to find olivine and quartz stable together in a melted rock, so this is an odd setup. The olivine and quartz resemble some of the mix of sedimentary and igneous rocks found near the source of this rock in New Mexico. The sediments are ancient, remnants of deposits in the inland seas that once flooded the continent, while the olivine is more recent, formed in igneous bodies that rose up during the formation of the Rio Grande Rift.The holes in the rock are probably vesicles; the remnant clay minerals in the rock were heated enough to the point that they broke down, releasing some of the water locked in their structure. That water expanded, creating a bubble in the rock that we call a vesicle.The rock is actually glassy. The solid, sedimentary grains are held together by a glass – the rock partially melted and then cooled really quickly afterwards. Know what it is yet?Oh and it’s lightly radioactive.This rock, Trinitite, is found outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico. It is the remnant of a mix of olivine and quartz-rich sediments that were flash-heated and suddenly cooled during the testing of the first nuclear weapon in the New Mexico deserts in 1945. Many samples of the rocks were collected by private dealers during the decades after the test; today the area has some degree of federal protection and collection of the remaining material is prohibited. The radioactivity is still present, but it is limited enough that the samples can be safely handled or stored.-JBBImage credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite#mediaviewer/File:Trinitite_from_Trinity_Site.jpgRead more:http://geology.about.com/library/bl/images/bltrinitite.htmhttp://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/09/trinitite-the-radioactive-rock-buried-in-new-mexico-before-the-atari-games/ -- source link

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