Trinitite
[6][7][8] Pieces of the material remain at the Trinity site as of 2018[update],[9] although most of it was bulldozed and buried by the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1953.
[11][12] In a 2010 article in Geology Today, Nelson Eby of University of Massachusetts Lowell and Robert Hermes describe trinitite: Contained within the glass are melted bits of the first atomic bomb and the support structures and various radionuclides formed during the detonation.
Similar glasses are formed during all ground level nuclear detonations and contain forensic information that can be used to identify the atomic device.
[17] Relatively volatile elements such as zinc are found in decreasing quantities the closer the trinitite was formed to the centre of the blast.
[18] The detonation left large quantities of trinitite scattered around the crater,[19] with Time writing in September 1945 that the site took the appearance of "[a] lake of green jade," while "[t]he glass takes strange shapes—lopsided marbles, knobbly sheets a quarter-inch thick, broken, thin-walled bubbles, green, wormlike forms.
[17] The glass has been described as "a layer 1 to 2 centimeters thick, with the upper surface marked by a very thin sprinkling of dust which fell upon it while it was still molten.
The color of the glass is a pale bottle green, and the material is extremely vesicular with the size of the bubbles ranging to nearly the full thickness of the specimen.
Red trinitite exists in both variants and contains glass rich in copper, iron, and lead as well as metallic globules.
[23] A single 10μm grain was detected after ten months of work examining six small samples of red trinitite.
[19][24][25] A 2010 study in the open access journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined trinitite's potential value to the field of nuclear forensics.
[17] Laser ablation was first successfully used to identify the isotopic signature unique to the uranium within the bomb from a sample of trinitite, demonstrating this faster method's effectiveness.
[2] For a time it was believed that the desert sand had simply melted from the direct radiant thermal energy of the fireball and was not particularly dangerous.
[40] The c.1988 artwork Trinitite, Ground Zero, Trinity Site, New Mexico by photographer Patrick Nagatani is housed at the Denver Art Museum.
[42] Black vitreous fragments of fused sand that had been solidified by the heat of a nuclear explosion were created by French testing at the Reggane site in Algeria.
The porous black material is named after one of the leading Russian nuclear weapons scientists, Yulii Borisovich Khariton.
