After the 1945 Nuclear Test, Something Unseen Before Happened

The first nuclear bomb test did not only change history. It also changed matter. When the Trinity test exploded in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, the blast released extreme heat and pressure that melted sand, metal, asphalt, cables, and test equipment into a strange glassy material later called trinitite.

For decades, trinitite was treated mostly as a radioactive relic of the atomic age. But scientists are now finding that it also preserved exotic crystal structures formed in conditions that almost never exist on Earth. In red trinitite, researchers have identified a previously unknown calcium copper silicate clathrate, the first crystallographically confirmed clathrate found among nuclear-explosion products.