Trinitite

Trinitite (pronounced trin-a-tight)

(1) The glassy residue left on the desert floor after the Trinity nuclear bomb test of 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA.

(2) By extension, any melt glasses left by nuclear bombs (known also as Alamogordo, atomsite glass or nuclear melt glass).

1945: Compound word trinit(y) +‎ -ite.  Trinity is from the Middle English trinitie & trinite from the Anglo-Norman trinitie or trinite (or ternite, trenite, trinetei, trinitiet & trinitet) from the Latin trīnitātem, accusative singular of trīnitās (the number three; a triad; the Trinity), from trīni (from trīnus (triple) from trēs, from the Proto-Italic trēs, from the primitive Indo-European tréyes (three)) + the suffix -itās from the Proto-Italic -itāts & -otāts from the primitive Indo-European –tehts, the suffix forming nouns indicating a state of being.  The suffix –ite is from the Ancient Greek -ίτης (-ítēs) and was adopted in Latin as part of Greek loanwords, both as –ītēs but also often as -īta.  It was used in Biblical tribal names (Thus either Levītēs or Levīta; plural in –ītae) and in the Medieval Latin of religious groups, such as Marcionītae, Ebiōnītae, Monophysītae.  It’s an adjective-forming suffix, especially of nominalised adjectives identifying groups of people as "those belonging to".  Trinitite is a noun; the noun plural is trinitites.  The verb trinitize is unrelated; it's from Christian theology and means "to divide into a trinity".

It was the physicist Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), head of the Manhattan Project which developed the first atomic weapons, who choose the name of the test site for the first atom bomb: Trinity.  He’s remembered for a snatch of verse he said the sight of the first atomic explosion made him recall, words from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.  Oppenheimer also had a fondness for the metaphysical poetry of John Donne (1572–1631), the Church of England cleric, and said he remembered also:

As West and East
In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one
So death doth touch the Resurrection

While those lines do not a Trinity make, others do such as Batter my heart, three person’d God and the Holy Trinity permeates much of his Donne's work.

Variations since Trinity include kharitonchik (melt glasses from the Soviet nuclear bomb Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan), impactite (metamorphic minerals caused by meteor heating of non-meteoritic materials), impact glass (melt glasses caused by meteor heating of non-meteoritic materials), fulgurite (melt glasses caused by lightning strikes) and fusion crust (metamorphic minerals on the surface of meteorites caused by atmospheric entry heating).  Trinitite has also been referred to as atomsite or Alamogordo glass (after the nearby city).

Physicist Norris Bradbury (1909–1997; director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory 1945-1970), group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled "Gadget" (code-name for the first plutonium A-bomb) atop the test tower, New Mexico, 16 July 1945).

The Trinity test of the plutonium A-bomb in New Mexico in July 1945 was a genuine test.  The uranium A-bomb which had also been built and which ultimately was dropped on Hiroshima in August was a device in which the scientists had such faith that it was deemed no test was necessary, something that sounds astonishing now but among all the physicists and engineers attached to the Manhattan Project (the A-bomb development team), there were no dissenting voices.  As a uranium bomb, the Hiroshima device was (at least for decades) a genuine one-off, all subsequent nuclear weapons being plutonium-based devices (and that may still be true; the details of the DPRK’s (North Korea) bombs remaining murky).  A uranium bomb turned out to be (relatively) easy to design and build and the trigger mechanism was simple but production of uranium to the specification required was a slow and exacting process given the machinery at the time available.  By contrast, a supply of weapons-grade plutonium was possible with the existing facilities but it was a formidable engineering challenge to create the trigger mechanism while ensuring the device remained within the size and weight parameters of a gravity bomb dropped from an aircraft which would have to fly thousands of miles to reach the target.  The Hiroshima bomb could be made to explode simply by firing a uranium bullet into the uranium core but if that approach was used with plutonium, all that would happen would be the melting of the core.  The solution was to surround the core with sufficient high-explosive to create the pressure required to trigger the chain reaction.  It was this process that the Trinity was staged to test.

Trinitite on the desert floor.

Although the test was over seventy-five years ago and completely fulfilled the purpose of testing the plutonium bomb, it was in another sense an extraordinary experiment in high-energy physics and even in the twenty-first century, analysis of the data and the physical aftermath at the site continues to reveal interesting discoveries.  Geological excavations in 2005 confirmed that the explosion, as predicted, initially pushed-down the ground but that it then rebounded, forcing the material upwards into the fireball in the sky where it was vaporized before cooling and crystallizing, eventually raining down in the form of the trinitite fragments.  Most of the trinitite was green because of the iron content in the sand while a smaller volume was black because their source was the iron from which Trinity’s tower structure was constructed and, being refined and processed, the iron content was much greater than that in the sand.  Finally, among all the trinitite, there was found a tiny number of red crystals which gained their color from all the copper cables which were also vaporized.  The propensity of copper to color its immediate environment was well-known, the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto formed in 1873 with a company name from the Rio Tinto (red river or Tinto River); the highly acidic river in the Sierra Morena mountains of southwestern Spain that runs red & orange because of the high copper content in the surrounding soil.

Red Trinitite.

Beginning in that fraction of a second when the nuclear age was born was the process which produced the red crystals, the extreme pressure and temperature (the Trinity site was briefly hotter than the surface of the Sun) forging a most unusual structure within one grain of the material just 10 micrometers across (barely longer than a red blood cell).  Made from silicon, copper, calcium and iron, the rare form of matter was called a quasicrystal.  Normally, crystals are made from atoms locked in a lattice that repeats in a regular pattern but quasicrystals, while having a structure that is orderly like a normal crystal, don’t have patterns which repeat and this grants quasicrystals properties forbidden to normal crystals.  First discovered in laboratory observations during the 1980s, quasicrystals also occur naturally in meteorites, matter transformed by stars, another place of extreme heat and pressure.

The Trinity test, the world's first nuclear explosion.

Until their observation in the 1980s, physicists regarded quasicrystals as “impossible” because they would have violated the rules scientists had over centuries constructed to define crystalline materials; the quasicrystal was thus a ‘black swan” moment in physics.  Traditionally, crystals were held to possess what were known as “rotational symmetries”, places where the structure could symmetrically be split in half, along one, two, three, four and six axes.  The black swan quasicrystal broke the rules or, more precisely, proved the rules were wrong, demonstrating instead an “icosahedral symmetry” a construct which includes six independent five-fold symmetry axes; as solids with these rotational symmetries, the quasicrystal is unique.  To the US military-industrial complex, it may also prove uniquely useful because, if a sample could be obtained of a quasicrystal created during nuclear tests conducted by other nations, it could be analyzed and might yield new understandings of their programs and weapons.  It’s always been possible to examine radioactive debris and gases to build models of how the devices were built and the materials used but those signatures decay.  Not only might a quasicrystal reveal new information but, and this is obviously most useful if the analytical process uses non-destructive tests, quasicrystals are a form of matter which goes as close (theoretically) to lasting forever as any yet known.

Lindsay Lohan (right) illustrating the typical hue of green trinitite (left).

What’s sometimes described as “trinitite green” and used for glass crockery or decorative items is misleading because such purity was never in New Mexico after the blast.  A glassy material, most trinitite exists in a range between a pale to olive green but smaller quantities in red and black have also been observed, the coloration dependent on the specific minerals and materials in the blast site.  The green is a product of iron while the red comes from the copper electrical wiring used in the Trinity test equipment being fused together with the quartz and feldspar sand grains from the desert floor.  A quirk is that red trinitite is brightly fluorescent under short wave ultra-violet light whereas the more abundant green variety of typically shows little to no fluorescence under UV, the difference again due to the mineral composition.  Black trinitite is rarest, formed by virtue of the presence of iron alone from the tower with no copper content.