OPPENHEIMER, TRINITY SITE AND TRINITITE

The widely acclaimed, 2023 Hollywood biographical movie Oppenheimer recently won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor (Cillian Murphy).

- STEVE VOYNICK

This blockbuster focuses on American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in leading the effort during World War II to design, build and successfully test an atomic bomb.

The development of the bomb was a milestone in history and science. And the most celebrated, sought-after, and readily available material reminder of that era is a greenish, quartz-based glass called trinitite.

FISSION AND FUSION

Trinitite was created at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium-implosion fission device was detonated at Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert north of Alamogordo-an event unforgettably portrayed in the Oppenheimer movie. With a TNT-equivalent energy yield of 125 kilotons, the blast's 3000°F temperatures completely vaporized the 100-foot-tall, steel detonation tower.

Two months later, Time magazine described Trinity Site's ground zero as a shallow, 2,400-foot-wide blast crater that appeared as "a lake of green jade."

The abundant, jade-like material that imparted a greenish color to the crater floor was initially named everything from "atomsite" and "a-bombite" to "Alamogordo glass," but the name that stuck was "trinitite." Scientists first assumed that trinitite was created when the heat of detonation fused the desert sand. But according to current theory, the greenish glass formed when sand was drawn up into the atomic fireball where it fused before falling in small, molten blobs to solidify on the desert floor.

TRINITITE

Classified as a man-made glass of indefinite composition and amorphous structure, trinitite consists mainly of quartz with lesser amounts of feldspar, hornblende and pyroxene minerals-the same basic composition as the original sand.