On a dark July morning in 1945, U.S. scientists and military personnel detonated the world's first nuclear bomb in a remote area of New Mexico. The blast unleashed the energy equivalent of 25,000 tons of TNT, completely vaporizing the bomb's drop tower and reducing the desert sand within a 1,000-foot (300 meters) radius to glass.
Scientists later dubbed this pale-green-and-red, faintly radioactive glass "trinitite" after the test site, Trinity. Now, more than 80 years later, researchers have discovered that some red trinitite contains unique crystals found nowhere else in nature. They detailed the finding in a study published May 11 in the journal PNAS.
