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Picked up a weird rock on a hike and it totally flipped my view
I used to just walk past rocks without a second thought, they were all the same gray lumps to me. Then last month, I was out on a trail run and tripped over this black, glassy piece that caught the sun. Turned out it was obsidian, and I learned it's actually volcanic glass that cools super fast. That blew my mind, because I always pictured volcanoes making rough, crumbly stuff. Now I can't stop looking at rocks when I'm outside, checking for different textures and colors. I even grabbed a book from the library to figure out what I'm seeing. It's wild how one stumble showed me there's a whole world in the ground under my feet. Guess I'm a rock guy now, who would have thought?
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roberthenderson7mo ago
Remember lightning makes glass rocks too.
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quinn3277mo ago
My cousin found one of those lightning glass rocks in Arizona after a storm. It was all twisted and glassy, looked like a weird root lol.
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the_troy7mo ago
Arizona gets some fierce summer storms... did your cousin say how far down the fulgurite went into the sand? I read that the shape tells you about the lightning path... like if it branched out or went straight down. The glass can be really brittle too... sometimes it falls apart when you dig it up. Was it complete or in pieces? Just curious because those things are like natural snapshots of a split-second event.
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verac367mo ago
Hey roberthenderson, you said "lightning makes glass rocks too" which is almost right but not exactly. Lightning doesn't make the glass out of nothing. When it hits sand, the crazy heat instantly melts the silica in the sand and fuses it into a glass tube shape. That's called fulgurite. It's different from obsidian, which comes from volcano lava. So the lightning is basically just melting what's already there into a new shape. It's why you only find that stuff in sandy places after a big storm.
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