Monday, January 14, 2008

Instant Glass at Faint Trace #3?

Pixelized image of recently discovered "lightning tracks" (faint trace #3). The scale is about a foot and a half across, the tracks are pencil-thin. Note that they are shallow and do not follow a crack system.

Your club's lightening bibliographer, Lucy, turned up this corroborating report. The Greenland hypothesis (see my italics) features instant glass, I like it:
Unusual features caused by lightning impact in West Greenland
Two lightning impacts are described from an area near the Inland Ice in West Greenland. The first lightning blasted an outcrop of metacherts. It subsequently split into two branches, which traversed rock outcrops and boulders, leaving behind two white almost straight lines, 30 m and 14 m long, respectively, where all lichens and plants were burned away. On the white lines the upper few millimetres of the traversed boulders were melted to a glass which subsequently peeled off by thermal expansion to leave a rough surface. Magnetic investigation of an amphibolite boulder found on the white line showed that a strong electric current indeed traversed the boulder. A few years later a second lightning impacted on a mountaintop close to the first impact. The second lightning left a trail on the rock surface covered by a thin layer of glass. The glass displays spectacular colours ranging from metallic blue to red, yellow and green.

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