This one's my favorite, 'cause it's just
full of weird stuff.
This is petrified lightning
so these are really rare they
form when lightning strikes a sand beach
and melts the sand in the beach and so
it ends up forming a path that the
lightning took through the sand, and we
call it a fulgurite but I think
petrified lightning is a cooler name.
This one is one of my favorites I love
this one so much, so this is Trinitite, when the first atomic bomb was set
off-- the first atomic bomb test, in New
Mexico, the heat from the blast was so
intense that it melted the floor of the
desert. Because it was formed in an
atomic bomb blast it is a kind of rock
that had never formed before in Earth
history or the history of any other
planet. I'm not sure that's a good thing
but we have some. We have a chunk of
the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge is part of the
largest mountain chain on earth
it's just that nobody knows that because
it's all underwater and we got this
because we had a faculty years ago who
took students on an expedition to the
North Atlantic and they sent down a
dredge and dredged up a chunk now it's
sitting in this cabinet. This one I love
because if I open this jar these will
melt these are deliquescent salts.
Deliquescent salts will absorb so much
water vapor from the atmosphere that
they will dissolve themselves into a brine
and so these are from the Atacama Desert
in Chile which is the driest place on
earth and they can only form in the
driest place on earth because if there's
any water vapor in the atmosphere at all
they absorb it and melt and so we have
to keep them sealed.
This is a chunk of calcite that the
Vikings used to navigate open seas on
cloudy days. There was an outstanding
debate for a long time about how the
Vikings could navigate across open seas
when they didn't have a compass but a
rock like this, a calcite like this,
allows you to find the Sun on cloudy
days by rotating it just so. So, we have a chunk of this also.
But, yeah, this cabinet is just full of odd things we've found.
