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Nuclear craters


Crazy Lee
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So I became distracted while looking something up on Wikipedia and found myself reading about Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear warhead test by the US (15mt). And I was astounded by the crater that thing left in the Bikini Atoll. So I started looking up other nuclear tests.

Nukes were tested in two locations. One in Nevada, and the other in the Marshall Islands at the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls as well as some at Christmas Island. Most were done either in the air, or on barges, or were too small to leave traces. But some left holes in the ground and I had fun trying to figure them all out. The tests have names based on their operation and the test name, so Castle Bravo is the Castle operation, and the Bravo test. Anyway, here's the craters and the tests associated with them:

Ivy mike, 1952, 10mt - First megaton device, first hydrogen device. Completely destroyed the island beneath it. The adjacent crater is from Castle Nectar.

Castle Bravo, 1954, 15mt - Largest bomb ever detonated by the US. Completely obliterated the island it was on. Adjacent crater is from the Castle Romeo Test.

Castle Romeo, 1954, 10mt - Detonated on a barge in the Bravo crater, hence why the Bravo crater is not perfectly round.

Castle Toon, 1954, 110kt - This fizzled and didn't work properly hence why the crater is so shallow, if that is a crater and not just a bay.

Castle Nectar, 1954, 1.7mt - Right next to the Ivy Mike test site.

Redwing Lacrosse, 1956, 40kt

Redwing Zuni, 1956, 3.5mt

Redwing Seminole, 1956, 13kt

Redwing Tewa, 1956, 5mt

Hardtack Maple, 1958, 213kt, or Hardtack Redwood, 412kt

Cactus Dome, Hardtack Cactus, 1958, 18kt  - Part of the Hardtack I tests, the crater was later filled with all the contaminated soil in the atolls and a cement dome was put on top of it.

So yes, we made weapons that can vaporize islands. Good job mankind.

Edited by Crazy Lee
fixing links....
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8moviequotes_gallery.jpg

There's also been use of an entire country as a testing ground for the effects of radioactive fallout on the civilian populace with methods such as taking leg bones from

the remains of dead youths for the testing for Stronium-223 absorption without parental consent or knowledge.

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Enewetak atoll is actually one of the most important sites for studying models for the formation and alteration of limestones, as well as being full of craters from nuclear shots. 

 

I would love to explore one and hopefully come across some trinitite!

 

Or maybe shocked-quartz? 

Edited by Saxon
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Just now, 6tails said:

You can find that stuff worldwide in contact layers. All you need is pressure.

I don't think shocked quartz does have a global distribution? It's rare at the surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stishovite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coesite

Shocked-quartz can't stand high-temperatures, and will slowly convert back to low-pressure quartz upon exhumation from high-presure low temperature zones, leaving a pseudomorph that is the shape of shocked quartz, but which has a normal crystal structure. 

It's mostly found in meteor craters or nuclear test sites. These are minerals which were discovered in high-pressure labs, before they were discovered in nature, such is their rarity. 

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Ah the US and nuclear weapons... they started it all, they might very well end it all someday ^w^

Delightfully poetic examples of cruelty and appetite for destruction can be found whenever you look a bit at the history of nuclear and thermonuclear WMDs ^^
Tales of tests on innocent civilians, tales of countless craters, and even a tale of how the US blew a nuke up in space (one of the dumbest nuclear experiments so far imo).

But when it comes to sheer destructive power I'm afraid the USSR takes the cake, especially if you're looking for nuclear craters!

Allow me to remind you of AN-602, an atmospheric test ... that still left a crater of a diamater of 50km... all vitrified ground.

And of course this was only one of the 91 nuclear tests in Novaya Zemlya... so If you wanna see craters, by all means do go there ^^
 

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1 minute ago, 6tails said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shocked_quartz

"Shocked quartz is found worldwide, in the thin Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary layer, which occurs at the contact between Cretaceous and Paleogene rocks."

 

I wasn't aware you were counting granules only visible under microscope? 'come across' rather implied something hand-sample sized.

Because if you're counting microscopic grains, blast-formed glass is also distributed globally, but you only come across visible specimins right near impact sites:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_desert_glass

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12 minutes ago, 6tails said:

I come across pieces of shocked quartz the size of marbles while digging out fractured schorl tourmaline all the time. Most of them do not come with the specular radiance that makes them worth much.

Where do you dig? It sounds metamorphic.

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Just now, 6tails said:

All over Southern California's deserts and mountains. This weekend I'm hitting up Steele Peak.

And the quartz crystals are not pseudomorphs? Stishovite and coesite don't last long at surface conditions. 

These things are notable because you only come across appreciable amounts at impact sites:

 http://www.mindat.org/min-1104.html

http://www.mindat.org/min-3790.html

Otherwise stishovite occurs as 'microscopic grain's and coesite occurs in the rims around reverted quartz crystals. 

You shouldn't be able to find marble sized pieces of the two, unless you're like, in the Barringer meteor crater or something. 

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2 hours ago, 6tails said:

You can get these pressures about 70km down. As they come back out of their crystalline form, hardening quartz can maintain the internal pressures to keep the crystal intact.

You'll find these along fault lines quite often. Mindat is nice but it's sorely lacking in much of any real location data excepting precious metal mines and a few famous gem mines.

I thought that the crystal hardening preserved coesite on rims, but not bulks of stishovite and coesite? Exhumation from 70km depth occurs on a length scale longer than the time it takes for the crystal to revert to a low pressure polymorph. 

Do you have a source describing and demonstrating their ubiquity? If they were everywhere...well they wouldn't exactly be regarded as special indicators of shock metamorphism, would they? 

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1 hour ago, Barnectomy said:

The Soviets ended up winning. Let me introduce Tsar Bomba, with a yield of 50 megatons. It was so powerful that the fireball almost reached the plane that dropped it.

They could have made it bigger, but Sakharov, a super-important researcher - fought against it, fought for disarmament even harder after the test, and caused many citizens of the USSR to put pressure on their government to limit proliferation. Tsar Bomba helped to ruin the Soviet nuclear programs.

I think it is even more interesting that the U.S. accidentally made a 15 megaton bomb - Castle Bravo as you may have seen above. Many many hours of research, labor, and experiment did not catch the error that would turn a bomb supposed to be 5-6 megatons into a monster.

Not only did it erase the test site, but all of the observers were too close, dust was thrown deep into the Pacific, and many people died. This did not kill the U.S. programs, but it boosted international awareness of the dangers of radiation from nuclear bombs.

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47 minutes ago, 6tails said:

The only source is that Wikipedia link stating the contact zone in which those are found. That happens to be a huge deal of what sticks up around here with us being situated between three major faults (Jacinto, Elsinore, Andreas.)

.

...you misunderstand the wiki article. Stishovite and tektite fragments in the K-P iridium rich clay are microscopic ejecta from a giant meteorite impact event. You should expect crystals which are more comfortably measured in micrometres in this clay, not marbles. The layer is global because it is made of very fine dust, which was disseminated in the upper atmosphere after the Chicxulub impact.

Whatever you have found cannot be Stishovite. 

Quoting Alvarez et al 1980 "In brief our hypothesis suggests that an asteroid struck the earth, formed an impact crater, and some of the dust-sized material ejected from the crater reached the stratosphere and was spread around the globe." 

You can find a description of the boundary layer clay in Science volume 208, issue 4448 6th of June 1980, pages 11095-1108

Morgan et al goes onto describe the size of the shocked quartz granules, and here is the map Morgan's team made:

 

The shocked quartz granules are measured in micrometers a typical granule is only 0.015 cm across. 

The biggest one they found was only 0.05 cm across.

stishovite map.png

Edited by Saxon
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8 minutes ago, 6tails said:

I think you're misunderstanding some basic geology.

Again, this structure can only be formed by intense pressure, but only moderate temperatures. The pressure is in the gigapascal range. The temperature's around 700C-1200C. It has to be a shock pressure, which means earthquake faults and plates slipping to cause a huge earthquake will create the shock necessary to form these materials just as well as a nuclear explosion or meteorite impact. Volcanic eruptions cannot reach the pressures required and are generally too hot.

These pressures and temperatures are found ~70km down, near the mantle. A good fault slip and you've got the creation of minerals you've never seen in your life (and which I'm trying to mine right now, Fosgateite, Riversideite, Merwinite, etc all lie within the same areas.)

 

Erm... no. Earthquakes generate lots of heat. Faults can make 'Psuedotachtylyte' which is a glass made from frictional heating of the fault plane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_friction

At shallower depths faults make rocks called 'Breccia' 'Mylonite' and 'Gouge' none of which contain shocked quartz.

Faults do not reach the massive pressures at the surface that you need to shock quartz, and they generate too much heat anyway- enough to melt rocks if the fault runs deep.

 

silica_phase_diagram.png

This is a phase diagram of quartz polymorphs. You cannot make stishovite at 0.7GPa, which is a really high fault pressure. You make stishovite at about 9 GPa and 400C.

 

 

 

Edited by Saxon
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Just now, 6tails said:

~450,000 PSI is nothing for an earthquake to produce at a fault zone with a slip.

Earthquakes make about 0.7GPa at a push. Let's be generous and say it's 1GPa.

 

You need 10 GPa to make stishovite:

 

silica_phase_diagram.png

 

Shocked quartz does not grow in fault planes. That is why nobody has ever reported it. 

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Just now, 6tails said:

Deep earthquakes in theory have gone past 20GPa. The closest we've been able to simulate them is at ~5GPa in the labs.

Quote your source. 

But I'd like to point out a bigger problem. You claimed to see stishovite in faults at the surface. Those faults in southern-california have spent their whole lives being surface faults. 

Even by your claims, it is impossible to make stishovite in them.

and even if you could generate stishovite on a fault plane at the bottom of the crust, (which you can't, because those fault planes are so hot they generate glass) by the time that rock is exhumed, the stishovite will have turned back into low-pressure quartz, because it is a metastable mineral. 

 

Stishovite is made is made in meteor impacts and nuclear blasts. Big crystals are very rare, and only found around impact sites which are geologically recent enough for the stishovite to still be there. 

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Oh you guys, turning this into a discussion on rocks.

I just decided to look at the Nevada test area. You want craters... wow. If you start at the Sedan crater, from a 104kt underground test, and look at the valley south of it, it's filled with hundreds of craters, most of them underground types.

I'm just trying to figure out what created this giant crater, which is the largest crater I've seen in the test area. If it is a crater (looks like an underground test).

 

6 hours ago, KookyFox said:

Allow me to remind you of AN-602, an atmospheric test ... that still left a crater of a diamater of 50km... all vitrified ground.
 

Tsar Bomba... I know of that. Did that leave a crater, even though it was an atmosphere test?

 

53 minutes ago, MalletFace said:

Not only did it erase the test site, but all of the observers were too close, dust was thrown deep into the Pacific, and many people died. This did not kill the U.S. programs, but it boosted international awareness of the dangers of radiation from nuclear bombs.

Also, a Japanese ship was contaminated. Caused a lot of controversy.

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Just now, 6tails said:

First source:

http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2013/09/24/scientists-push-closer-understanding-mystery-deep-earthquakes

 

Now to address your assertion that this can't be done in an earthquake

Read the Synthesis section of the Wikipedia Stishovite Article:

"Until recently, the only known occurrences of stishovite in nature formed at the very high shock pressures (>100 kbar or 10 GPa) and temperatures (> 1200 °C) present during hypervelocity meteorite impact into quartz-bearing rock. Minute amounts of stishovite has been found within diamonds,[9] and post-stishovite phases were identified within ultra-high pressure mantle rocks.[10]"

As for Southern California being surface faults their entire lives, that's incorrect as well. Think about tectonic movement over a long time scale. In fact, we're figuring out that the Newport-Inglewood fault is most likely the original site of the Pacific plate meeting up with the North American plate, despite being 40+ miles away from the current location of the subduction zone as is known today. There's also helium-3 found in the oil wells along this fault, which only comes from the earth's mantle. The odds of other faults in the area being as old or older are pretty good, and being that deep is a good chance as well. http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/06/newport_inglewood_fault_deep.php

 

 

None of this suggests that there should be stishovite in your faults, though. Ultra-high pressure mantle rocks are deep, like over 400km deep, as the article you linked to stated.

By the time such rocks are exhumed, any stishovite would have converted to low quartz. 

You don't have marble sized stishovites accessible at the surface in the faults of southern california. They would have been reported by now, given than stishovite crystals only 0.015cm across and buried in clay have been considered important enough to write papers about. 

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5 minutes ago, 6tails said:

Minute amounts of stishovite has been found within diamonds (this means it can be preserved within a stable strong crystal matrix,)

Note, all the pictures of stishovite you can find, all of then have a thin covering of quartz over them.

It's like a Prince Rupert's Drop.

Stishovite survives within diamonds as tiny inclusions because the crystal around it is too rigid to allow the pressure to decrease. 

Stishovites don't have a thin covering of quartz over them, because they are quartz, they are a polymorph of quartz. 

Pseudomorphs of stishovite can frequently be found which have the same dipyramidal shape that original stishovite has, but which are made out of alpha quartz, the low pressure polymorph. This is because big crystals of stishovite cannot survive at low pressure, being metastable, so they slowly change back into alpha quartz. 

Stishovite crystals found on the surface are young, and have not had time to turn back to normal alpha quartz. Big ones are observed to result from nuclear shots. 

All of this is established, while your claim, that faults in southern California are making stishovites the size of peas, is completely inconsistent with any idea of how stishovite forms, even the experimental ideas about stishovite forming in the mantle. 

Edited by Saxon
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10 minutes ago, Mikazuki Marazhu said:

As someone who lived in islands, I prefer the ocean takes them than with human hands.

I feel like crying

It's okay. Above ground Nuclear tests have been banned for some time. The Atolls are not going to be bombed anymore. 

 

@6tails Please post a photo of your claimed stishovite crystals. You can also take them to any natural history museum and ask for them to be identified formally; they'll probably saw them up and look at them under the microscope. 

I'm betting they'll turn out to be alpha quartz, or some other white crystal like baryte or calcite, because these are ubiquitous in fractures.

 

 

Here's an example of some quartz I found on what I suspect is a fault plane in Newfoundland [geology in this area was not properly mapped]

The quartz didn't actually grow on the fault until a long time after the motion, when the crack was annealed by silica dissolved in water, percolating into the void and crystalising:

 

 

quartz canada.png

Edited by Saxon
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2 minutes ago, Crazy Lee said:

Tsar Bomba... I know of that. Did that leave a crater, even though it was an atmosphere test?

I do not believe so.

Exploring Novaya Zemlya's Sukhoy Nos test site up from Rogachevo yields this odd spot that seems to be the popular location of the test.

I believe the bomb was detonated elsewhere, though; bomber-carried nuclear bombs are usually not tested on the base of a mountain and many sources state the Tu-95 dropped the bomb in the nearby bay area of the test site.

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8 hours ago, 6tails said:

I'll have to go back to the site to get them, because in that area, I was after the vast tourmaline and garnet deposits (and the mica which a local electronics company wanted samples of.) I didn't bring back anything else (besides the two magnetite pieces which at first I thought were meteor pieces.)

But this weekend I'm taking control of Oro del Diablo. The owner of the claim has given me permission to take it over. I've got a LOT of work to do covering 20 acres. I suspect there's zircon as well as gold in the area given the geological composition.

Will you accept that no pea-sized stishovites have ever been recorded to occur at the surface in active faults, that stishovites in the K-P ejecta clay are exclusively microscopic and that no pea-sized stishovite formed at depth has ever been reported to survive exhumation? 

Given this, will you accept that until you have them formally identified otherwise, the best explanation is that the crystals you have found are not stishovites, and that, by your argument, if they were stishovites you would have also expected to find diamonds along side them? 

 

oB4rW.gif

 

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19 minutes ago, 6tails said:

For now until the analysis of what is out there is concluded.

1-2mm isn't exactly microscopic. My guitar picks are 0.73mm thick and easily visible from the sides.

Well, from what I'm reading, everybody crushes the hell out of the mineral-bearing samples to begin with before testing, so they'd likely never have known if a large one existed in the first place. Every study I see with Stishovite in it mentions grinding the ore down. I'll say it's never survived exhumation because they'd probably never observed the samples very carefully, being under the assumption that such things can only form to such size under such conditions (which we've even proven ourselves wrong time and time again, that's what science is about.)

The granules aren't 1-2mm. They are 0.1 to 0.2 mm

100 micrometers = 0.1 mm, which is incidentally the limit of your eye's ability to resolve objects, or in common parlance 'microscopic'. 

If you think everybody crushes their samples before analysing them, how do you think macroscopic samples of stishovite were found in impact craters, hmm?

 

 

 

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I love watching old news reels of nuclear tests.  

You may also want to look up the Nike Missile batteries.  In later versions the US installed nuke-tipped missiles in circular rings around major cities and military sites.  Here in northern Virginia there are still traces of some of the sites.  One site was absorbed into a DC minimum security prison (now closed) but that conversion preserved the original buildings and launch doors which can still be seen today overgrown with trees and weeds.  

 

  

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