From the Book of Sand

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lam. And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, if you're watching on video, obviously, we are not in our normal places, and I'm going to be talking to you from the gray matte underworld or the other world. I can't remember what we decided to call it. The places we usually come from. Today we are recording remotely at the studio at Bahamar because they are a sponsor of this episode. That's right. We're in the Bahamas. I made a point of walking in the sand on the beach before I came in here today because we are going to be talking about sand. I kind of like to tie these kind of things together when there's some travel involved. I'm also, you can't see it, but I am wearing flip flops. It felt appropriate. It felt like Jimmy Buffett would want me to wear flip flops for this recording. So I honor his spirit in doing so. Stuff on a pop top yet? Fortunately not. And you don't want to engineer that. It ruins the magic of it. Yeah. So yeah, we're going to talk about sand here today. I think sand is a great topic because in general, I think a lot of people have certain feelings about it in the imagination, but also very personal opinions about sand. I don't know about you, Joe. I enjoy the sand. I don't like sand where it's not supposed to be, but I like going into a region of sand, experiencing the sand. I like the feeling of walking on a beach and feeling it move beneath my toes, getting the different consistencies of sand. I like digging in the sand. But I also know plenty of people who are like an absolute no to beach time because they just don't like sand. I mean, Star Wars memes aside, they just don't like it and it goes everywhere. I feel about the sand the way I feel about sweat, which is I like being sweaty when you're supposed to be sweaty and I hate being sweaty when you're not supposed to be sweaty. There you go. You know, working up a sweat when you're exercising feels great. Working up a sweat when you're like getting dressed, ready to go out somewhere is the worst feeling. Yeah. And sand, yeah, it's like when you're at the beach, there's nothing better. Actually, I like literally I love the feeling most of what I do at the beach when I go is just like walk around and feel the sand on my feet. Yeah. That's, you know, I'm not a huge swimmer, but I do love that. But yeah, getting like sand in your shoes or sand in your underwear when you're not at the beach, that's not so great. Yeah, we're the bed. It is one of the reasons I've never even mentioned a sand camper. I've done a little of it, but it's not really my cup of tea just because I have a harder time maintaining that that that line between the sand world and my non sandy world. Yeah. But but still I've had some great times camping on the beach as well. You know, I was just thinking about how in Dune, there is so much about the absence and preciousness of water, but I was struggling to remember are there equivalent sentiments the characters express about the abundance or overabundance of sand. Hmm. Well, I'm trying to remember. You've been reading Herbert more recently than I have. Yeah. Though by so now I'm reading Dune Messiah, which I've actually never read before. So I'm finally getting into the sequels. I'm enjoying it though. I'm aware there are diminishing returns as you continue, but it depends. If you open your whole heart to it, I'm of the opinion there are gems to be found in each of the books. OK. But those the first two books are special in my opinion. I've enjoyed them all, but but yeah, it's different once you get into the later books. The second book I've noticed so far, there is significantly less ecology in it and it is more politics and conspiracy. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's a dark read and its own right. We will be talking a little bit about Dune as we proceed here. We'll talk a little bit about some technology, some from in technology from the from kit. But yeah, this is where I guess we get more into the imagination sphere for sand because it does bring up a lot of ideas. And so I was thinking like, what are some of the core ideas I keep coming back to and I keep seeing and in my readings and things I'm watching, things I'm thinking about. I think one of the big ones that everyone's probably thinking of is of course, sand as the infinite, you know, uncountable grains of sand and deserts that stretch beyond site or on beaches that just vanish into the ocean unseen. I think of sand to the hourglass. I think of the excellent short story, the book of sand from Horace Borges about a tome of infinite random numbered pages. So anytime you you open the book, you'll find different numbers and they might be it might be just a small number colossal number. I think at one point it's like a number to the ninth power that the reader finds. And and then the script itself is written in some language that he can't decipher and sometimes with a crude image, but it is infinite and you'll never find the same page twice. And he fears that if he burns the book, it will an infinite book will burn infinitely and just, you know, cloak the world and smoke. Infinite smoke. Yeah. So I think about stuff like that. I read this story last night actually. Oh, you were telling me about. It's like three pages long. Yeah. It's it's it's great. One of the things I love about Borges is deep. He's often very brief. One thing I like about that story is that it begins as with so many Borges stories with a traveler arriving strange traveler who has an artifact to share with you and then the the protagonist greatly desires to acquire the artifact. And so in this case, yeah, he becomes entranced because he finds a page in the book that has a tiny illustration of an anchor on it. And then he like turns the pages then can't ever find the anchor again. Yeah, it describes like trying to get to the first page and it's impossible because pages just keep multiplying towards the covers. You know, it's got an epigraph to a poem by by George Herbert that refers to the idea of ropes of sand, you know, a common metaphor for something that is like unstable or not substantial. But the other metaphor with sand in the story is like you're saying the idea of the infinite that that sands are infinite and therefore, you know, they could they could just multiply forever like the pages of this book. The funny thing is, of course, grains of sand are not actually infinite. Grains of sand are perfectly finite. That is a countable thing. It's not practically countable by human beings, but in theory is countable. And in fact, you know, mathematically speaking, any finite number is infinitely small than infinity. So the number of grains of sand in the universe is infinitely less than an actual infinity. Yeah, yeah. Some of you may be thinking of this. We're not really going to get into this concept in this episode, but Archimedes, of course, famously tried to figure out what was the upper bound for the number of sand grains in the universe. So it's, you know, he was of the mind. It can be counted or at least estimated. Yeah, which, you know, in the whole like methods of estimation of substances like that, I think are a really interesting topic. We've talked about on the show before. Long ago, we did an episode on Fermi estimation. Remember that, which is just like a sort of orders of magnitude based system for estimating numbers of uncountable things. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned sand falling through the fingers, passing through the fingers, the ephemeral nature of things made out of sand. That is, I think, another major theme you see over and over again. And of course, you see it in things like sand mandalas or sand castles, you know, where you can create this thing of beauty out of the sand, but it will not last and not supposed to last. And of course, neither do we. Let's see other ideas. Sand is a varied substance. Of course, not all sand is the same. Right. Some of the things we call sand, especially when we get off of our planet, you get into various discussions about, is it sand? Is it soil? Is it soil? Is it really sand? And you kind of go back and forth and then sometimes people just call it sand. Am I correct in understanding that sand is not a name for a substance. It's a name for a size of particle. Sand is a grit size. Right. But people can get a little particular, like for instance, we're not really going to get into the hourglass here. We might come back and do a full episode on the hourglass in the future, but some people will point out, well, actually it's not sand in an hourglass. It's this particular recipe of particles that works well with an hourglass. And I guess there are things that might fit the definition if you just go by grain size, but nobody would call them sand. Like would sugar be sand if you just go particle size? You would get weird looks if you ask for it. Like give me the sweet sand, the sand that goes in my coffee. People would ask who is this space, Ailey. But yeah, I mean, the other thing is, you have different colors of sand, different consistencies of sand, like digging in the beach. I know that like sometimes you have that sand that is like a powder or when it's compacted, it's like a, it's almost like a clay that you can mold. And other times the bits of like shell in the sand, it's so like coarse and rough that you just like scrape your hands up digging in it, you know? But you can't stop because it's what you do at the beach. Likewise digging in the sand, you quickly often realize, well, this is a thing, this is a world that creatures live in as well. You know, you might encounter things like periwinkles or sandhoppers, sand fleas, whatever you want to call them. Or of course the mighty sand crabs darting in and out of their little layers. And then yeah, and then just back to sand castles as well. It's kind of like a very early experiment with the idea of what large scale things can I make out of the smallest visible pieces, you know? So you're not really, you know, dealing with things at an atomic level, obviously, but especially as a child, like the sand seems like the boundary of smallness. And it's like you bring these together, you make a clump, you make a ball that becomes a tower. Towers are bridged together, it becomes a castle. And yeah, I think there's something insightful there. Like we begin to sort of gaze into these mysteries of sand at an early age. All right, so for the majority of the section I'm taking in this episode, I wanted to talk about a couple of ideas from science fiction concerning sand. And these are little ideas that are in neither case, or they particularly key to the work. You could take them out of each work and it would be fine. But they've always stuck in my mind because they were neat uses of sand. And so I'm kind of using those as a place to jump off to briefly talk about some other mostly space related topics, but also some kind of like military world and infrastructure type topics. So the first before I get to do the one I want to mention is a 1984 novel that fewer people have read, but it still has quite a following. It's called Armor. It's by an author by the name of John Stakely, S-T-A-K-L-E-Y, if you're looking him up. This is the same guy who wrote Vampires with a dollar sign, which John Carpenter, well, John Carpenter directed the adaptation of it. As we've discussed before, probably not at the top of anybody's Carpenter list. Still has some great moments in it. Never seen the whole thing actually. Oh, you haven't? I was not able to finish it the time I tried to watch it. I can't remember. I'm a huge Carpenter fan, but I just didn't love this one. It has its moments, but the book was better in my memory. The dollar sign was better, yeah? The dollar sign was cool. Is it about money? Yeah, you know, the business of slaying vampires. I'm a little foggy on it. The main thing that sticks with me out of that book is just how scary the vampires were. They were just scary and nasty in a way that they touched on a little bit in the movie, but they're just really awful. You just hate vampires in this book. Armor, however, is more in keeping with your Starship Troopers sort of world, where it's humans in power armor, like crazy powerful power armor. And they're battling insect aliens on the surface of a distant desert world called Banshee. And there are a lot of interesting twists and turns in this, and the writing is really bombastic, and you really feel the action. But at one point, the human faction here with their power armored soldiers, they use a large high tech sci-fi machine and a sandclotter called Siliconite 18. And they use this this combination to suck sand in through the front of this machine. And then it like leaves behind it essentially prints a five trail of five meter tall, perfectly smooth stone wall to fortify their makeshift base out on this desert world. Okay, so it sucks in sand and it adheres it into a solid substance. Yeah, yeah, it creates like a solid sandbrick wall, which I always thought was pretty cool. And I'm kind of surprised I haven't like seen that used in media elsewhere in video games or something. Maybe it is. But this is this is really interesting because yes, we're talking about sci-fi far future warfare here. But of course, human have been doing this in the real world for quite a while, often in the form of sandbags. Yeah, funny story. So this podcast started a lot of people who listen probably don't even know this. This podcast started originally when we were writers and editors for the website howstuffworks.com many, many years ago, which was like a encyclopedic informational website that had articles like, you know, how a car engine works and stuff. So I was hired on you were a writer at that website when I joined as an editor in 2010 or something. And then before times. Yeah, that long, long ago. And one of the first articles I edited for a edited for the website was how sandbags work. Now you wouldn't think that there's that much to say about how a sandbag works. But I remember it being a surprisingly rich and interesting topic, but all the things sandbags can do and in fact do better than other more high tech. Solutions. Exactly. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. Like I, I grew up in a household. My, my dad was always into a lot of like World War II stuff and did models of tanks. And so I was familiar with pictures of tanks. And in reading about sandbags here, I had to go back and remind myself, oh yeah, they would obviously see all these images of World War II tanks with sandbags layered on top of the metal armor of the tank to add like additional in the field protection against ballistics. So I was reading a bit more about this out like why are sandbags good for this. 2016 study from Chen at all from the National University of Singapore and this was published by ASM international. And they conducted a study and they, and in the study pointed out that, yeah, of course, sand has been used in fortifications for a long time and we've known that it's great at absorbing energy. And, but they looked into it a little bit more and they found that sand can absorb more than 85% of the energy exerted against it. And its resistance actually increases with the speed of the projectile, even at high velocities. So they experimented by firing various projectiles at silica sand blocks. And one of the really interesting things they point out is that when a projectile hits a block of compacted sand, such as I believe like in a compacted military sand bag or a HESCO bastion, which is a collapsible wire mesh container, they then get filled up with sand or soil or gravel. But the extreme frictional force of the sand particles against the projectile passing through it can potentially break that projectile into pieces. So think to, you know, your childhood, perhaps if you were a beach going child, digging in the sand and eventually feeling your hands becoming raw from all those sand particles, you know, because it's sand. Now imagine a projectile passing through compacted sand at high speed and the friction of that. It's pretty fascinating. Like this could essentially destroy the projectile as it passes through. Meanwhile, the same projectile, if it is powerful enough to pass through the metal barrier, it will just pass through and can continue to, you know, decimate somebody or something on the other side. So one of the things they end up arguing in this paper is like we should be looking at more ways to use sand either in place of substances like steel or figuring out how to best layer them with steel or other materials. Like, I guess it's just fascinating to think, you know, we think about the armor of the future. We think about things like a power armor and suits and steel and plates and powerful plates or energy. Or plastic, plastic steel. You know, some sort of crazy plastic that's as strong as steel. But at the end of the day, there's a strong case to be made that we should not forget sand because sand, again, is just an amazing absorbance substance for these sorts of projectiles and this sort of energy. Well, I know you were already talking about this. I think maybe this came up when we were talking last night. But, you know, I recall seeing plenty of examples through, you know, world history, military history of like metal plate armor and sand used in combination, like one against the other. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, certainly you see a lot of like makeshift, you can like pack up the sandbags and you create a little wall and then there's the example of the tanks. But I don't know, there's something about like, I don't recall ever really putting it together too much that, oh, yeah, I'm looking at sandbags on those tanks, you know. It's one of those things that's so mundane, you know, you see sandbags a lot. You can kind of become blind to what's going on there. To the beauty of the sandbag. Yeah, yeah. All right, now moving from the sandbag back into the science fiction future. Let's come at last to Dune. Okay. Frank Herbert's 1965 novel and then the same technology does come up a little bit, at least in one of the other books, but it does make it does hit in the first one as well. So the Fremen make use of a sand compactor as part of the standard Fremkit. You know, the Fremkit is the thing like, you know, it's hidden away for Paul and his mother and, you know, then they have to use it on their own surviving out in the sands of Arrakis. So that's also going to have stillsuit. Yeah, stillsuit. It goes on your body. It protects you, keeps you from losing moisture to the environment. Does it have a thumper? The thumper, yeah, that was in the kit. That either, is it either a tract or it distracts the worn out? Maybe a both. Yeah, there's a, yeah, depending on how you're using it, there's a tent, I believe. And then there are probably some things that don't aren't mentioned. There's probably, I'm thinking there's a mint in there, maybe a piece of gum. I don't know why not. But the sand compactor. Moisturizer lotion. Yeah, you want a little moisturizer, you know, maybe a nice note. Well, there was a note, but I don't know how nice it was. It's like, hey, sorry, but had to do this. But yeah, the sand compactor is probably one of the weirder ones. And I remember thinking it was really cool when I first read Dune, because it is described as a sand compaction tool that realigns sand grains and allows you to effortlessly burrow out of a sand buried tent. And presumably has other purposes. I think it's used slightly differently in a later book, but I'm assuming you could also use it to maybe blast the sand off of your feet. And it seemingly involves binding sand grains together with an electromagnetic charge. Oh, okay. Yeah. Now, as I understand it, the cool thing about this is that this particular gadget, of course, remains a tool of the far future Imperium we see in Dune. But we do have electrostatic gadgets that can clean up sand. There's something called an EDS, an electrodynamic screen, which is kind of an electrostatic cleaning system for removal of sand particles from solar panels. Because you have a bunch of sand accumulate, even just little bits of it on solar panels that's going to get in the way of how effective they are. So this technology exerts an electrostatic force to remove sand from that screen. Okay. In a sense, yeah, there's a connection to be made between these two different technologies. Like an electromagnetic vacuum. Yeah. Yeah. And, but again, this is the kind of thing I feel like would make me more of a beach camper if I could like point a flashlight sort of shaped object at my feet and just kind of like hose them off with pure dry electrostatic charge or something. Now, coming back to the idea of sand constructions on other worlds, so kind of coming back to that, that armor example of printing out fortresses on Banshee. There are actually a number of proposals to do a certain amount of manipulation of the regolith on our moon as well as on Mars. The lunar regolith isn't quite sand by many definitions. It's sometimes referred to as such and sometimes it's called soil, though plenty of people will point out, well, it's not soil. Earth soil is of course a essentially a living thriving organically active thing and that is not what you get on the moon. Yeah. We've gone into more depth than this sort of thing before when we talked to like what is like lunar dust and often dust is a is a is good or a better descriptor as well. But there is the idea that we could create various sort of sometimes called lunar creeds or astro creeds that are essentially there are a lot basically there are a lot like terrestrial concretes. They would they would still be complicated to carry out like it's not just a matter of like well send them up to the moon or send them to Mars with a just a bag of of like mix that you buy at the store. We're still dealing with something that would be difficult to carry out especially in such an environment and essentially in some of these cases might have to be like 3D printed as well. But it's a it means that you wouldn't have to bring everything as a module up from Earth and then send it over. You could create some amount of your infrastructure you know foundations you know even hold buildings or tunnel systems by transforming you know the the sand if you will that you have there into some sort of concrete astro creed or lunar creed substance. This next example is fascinating because it also it makes perfect sense once it's rolled out but it also feels like even more sci-fi than some of these cases like it sounds like a little more grim dark than what then anything that is actually rolled out in in the book armor. But it's really cool so astro creed as proposed by scientists from the University of Manchester this calls for the use of human urea and other excretions to strengthen the regolith concrete essentially making a kind of bio composite out of it. Okay and is plenty of science. PP bricks but as one of the main things that the headlines and even the authors of and the the the the proponents of this this plan the way that they put it is blood saying like this would be like the blood of astronauts. And so there's a twenty twenty one study here published in materials today bio and the title is blood sweat and tears extraterrestrial regolith bio composites with in vivo binders by Roberts at all. And yeah they get into it and discuss how a protein from human blood proteins from human blood conform this bio composite material with the moon the moon's dust or Mars dust you know the sand of either world if you will. And that the compressive strength of the bio composite materials is ultimately on par with concrete. Wow. And by incorporating incorporating urea from urine they can actually increase the compressive strength by over 300%. So there's power in PP bricks. Blood and PP bricks blood and PP bricks. Yeah. And this would be something that would be potentially then 3D printed on site. So something actually not unlike the wall printers in the novel armor at least in spirit. And one thing that they do stress and this is you know you get into the logistics of this you'd have to have your astronauts essentially continuously donating plasma. And they're not going to be on top of their waste products which they're going to have to shed anyway but donating plasma for the purposes of then later 3D printing these bricks. So I think that's they're not going to be under any stress or anything. Yeah but they the authors here do make a point of saying we would need to figure out exactly what the right regiment for this would be you know because I'm guessing on the way over maybe they were to a certain extent me more be more down time down time. And you could kind of like put your astronauts on drip and get some fluids from them. But we know that journeys between planets and journeys between our world and its moon. These are not stress free environments either. So you can't you have to basically their point is like you don't want to in any way incapacitate or decrease the effectiveness of your astronauts. While at the same time you know putting my drip a little bit in order to build your bricks in the future. OK yeah. So I don't know I really really like this idea it's been out for a few years so I can only imagine that somebody's latched onto it in science fiction. Certainly some of the more recent Mars colony lunar colony visions. What you know you could imagine that if if the stress on the astronauts body is too much you could have a kind of separate classes of people going to other planets. So you'd have you'd have the astronauts who are there to work and then the ones who were there to be a to be a blood and pee pee bag. Oh yeah that that's interesting that certainly that's the kind of idea you could explore in some of these. I know and some of them have talking about different cast systems for far future humans on on other worlds. I'm a Mars blood boy. Yeah. Yeah I'd read it. All right I have one more one last space sand topic I want to discuss here and it involves the electric sand of Titan which I have to admit that sounds pretty metal and is ultimately pretty metal. So we've covered. Song by sleep I think it could very much be a sleep song or an early electric wizard song from some of their spaceier material. Yeah. It basically could fit just about any like 70s dim sound drop out of life on a rope of sand. Yeah. Yeah that kind of vibe. Yeah. So we're going to Titan for this topic. We've covered Titan on the show before. This is Saturn's largest moon. It has a thick atmosphere and earth like systems of flowing liquid only instead of water it has liquid hydrocarbon such as methane and F a. Yeah. However it may have a subsurface ocean of water and in many ways it is very earth like but with that caveat caveat of don't go anywhere beyond earth and expect to easily find something exactly like earth. It's still very extreme. It's very cold. It has ice like rocks and possibly volcanoes that spout liquid water. It's a rough place if we were to imagine ourselves physically being there. Right. It's the second largest moon in our solar system trailing the Jovian moon of Ganymede. It's larger than both earth moon and the planet Mercury. And it does have sand. I think that comes with an asterisk though. Yeah. Yeah. But we have to have sand in other worlds. We have to we have to add the caveat that you know scientists will disagree on terminology from time to time. But scientists will often use the term sand when talking about it at least with the public. So as described on the NASA fact sheet for Titan dark earth like sand dunes stretch across the cross parts of Titan and the sand is composed of dark hydrocarbon grains often described as probably looking like coffee grounds. Oh, interesting. So again, you know, feels very doom metal, you know, black deserts of weird sand. And I included an image here in our notes, Joe. And maybe we can even splash this up for for video to see since it's a NASA JPL image. But what I'm looking at here is an image of sand dunes on the moon of Titan. And this is this is detected via Cassini's radar. Okay. So like just long, long parallel dunes like you might see in some in some deserts on earth. Yeah, exactly. So it's frequently compared to deserts on earth and people pointing out, yeah, yeah, we this is this is kind of like an earth desert except very different in other ways. But where this gets really cool, I thought. I mean, it's already really cool. But in 2017, Joshua Mendez, a granular dynamicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, proposed in a paper published in Nature Geoscience titled electrification of sand on Titan and its influence on sediment transport that the sands might become electrically charged via the tribal electric effect. This is something we experience all the time, like say when you have static electricity that causes packing peanuts to cling to your fingers, you know, the grains of sand on Titan might do something similar in a very unique way for a number of reasons. So the sand grains on Titan, they're fluffier than sand on earth. And the gravity there is seven times weaker than our own, meaning that the sand particles can potentially stick together in ways that we just do not see on earth. So we have the same, you know, the the the tribal electric effect is going to be in play here on earth with sand, but we have a different gravity situation and different consistency of our sand grains. But the headline grabbing take home here, as the researchers discuss, is that you could make a sandcastle on Titan out of this crazy goth black sand, and it might stay up for weeks without the need of water or anything to it would just be the electric charge holding everything together. Interesting. Okay. So I'm imagining not sandcastles, but like weird like Wayne Barlow, Esk, alien sculptures on Titan out of this stuff. The deeper application here is that, you know, beyond the flashy headlines is that it might explain the shape and formation of these sand dunes. We just explained that can't as easily be accounted for by the wind. So, you know, we look at the way sand dunes form on earth, and then we look at this example on Titan, we're like, oh, it's like we have here, except we're not going to have the same wind scenario on Titan to form them. This may be what's key to the formation of these dunes on Titan. That's really interesting. Yeah. It reminds me of something we've talked about on the surface of Jupiter's moon, Io, where there was a similar question about has shifting sand dunes, sand dunes that move over time and we can see that through like orbital imagery. And so the question is how do they move because Io basically has no appreciable atmosphere, you know, it's not going to have winds like our atmosphere does. I remember the main hypothesis we looked at for that was a paper that was talking about sort of explosive gusts of gas that I think are related to volcanic activity on Io essentially creating temporary transient winds, even though there's not really much of an atmosphere. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. All right, we're going to move on to another section here. And this is your angle. And I think this is a great selection in part because it gets into some other like major things that come to our mind when we think about sand, things that sand can be turned into. They go well beyond just making it into a brick or a bag of sand. It's not just for sand bags. So yeah, we've talked about sand in its loose form. And of course, I think everybody knows that melting sand is how you make glass. But when it comes to making glass, not all sand is the same to make industrial glass with a high level of transparency. So, modern glass makers usually select high purity quartz sand, which consists of almost pure silicon dioxide or silica and some other additives usually to aid in the manufacturing process. Like they introduce stuff to lower the melting point of the silica and make it easier to produce or to produce desired characteristics in the final product. So one example of this is introducing boron to the glass, boron trioxide to make what's called borosilicate glass. This kind of glass has the benefit of being more resistant to thermal shock due to a low coefficient of thermal expansion. So Rob, I don't know, have you ever shattered something made of glass due to heat mismanagement of heat and cold? Ooh, maybe I haven't. Well, you're lucky. Yeah, generally it's just fingers to blame. Poor guesswork on how much of the table I have set the glass on, that sort of thing. That can do it too. But yeah, normal glass expands and contracts a lot relatively a lot. It expands and contracts due to changes in temperature. And so if you've got a glass or a glass baking glass container and you change the temperatures on it too rapidly, it creates stress on the brittle structure of the glass because like in one part of it, it's getting hotter faster than the other part and expanding faster or vice versa. And this can cause it to shatter. Borosilicate glass is better about this, which is why it is often used to make glass bakeware. They do also use sodalime glass to make glass bakeware. But borosilicate glass is less vulnerable to thermal shocks. They're not invulnerable. I know people who have baked dishes made of glass designed for that purpose still explode due to mismanagement of hot and cold. You don't want to get a hot dish out of the oven. You've just had it in a 400 degree oven and then put it on like a puddle of cold water. That's dangerous. That's good to know because that is the sort of thing I could conceivably do. And I will make a point of not doing that. Don't do that. That's how to make your baking dish explode. Anyway, that's industrial glass. But of course, there are also natural forms of glass made from melted sand. And I want to talk about one type of naturally occurring sand based glass called fulgurite. So fulgurite is a mineral made of silica or silicon dioxide that has been fused by the heat of a bolt of lightning. I thought that's pretty cool. So the name comes from the Latin word for lightning and it can be formed when lightning hits multiple kinds of substrate. It can form in clay or soil or in solid rock. But the most common type of fulgurite is made when lightning strikes sand. And for this reason, you can often find fulgurites on beaches or in the desert. So a common recognizable form of fulgurite is a partially buried crusty looking tube. But that's going to be hollow in the middle. And then on the inner surface, it will be glassy but not usually smooth on the outsides. Outsides often look very rough and knobbly. They look like a flute that orcs would play. Something of Mordor technology about them. Or like that effect you get when you burn a candle many times in a row and it creates this like melted black structure on the outside. A lot of fulgurites look like that on the outside due to I guess some kind of melting and then partial melting around the outer surface. Which is going to mean that like unmelted sand grains end up adhering to it. So you get this rough outer surface. They vary in thickness and length somewhere between one and several centimeters thick. And they sometimes have these branching or forked shapes which indicates the path the lightning took as it was conducted into the ground through the soil or rock. Around the outside, again, they're usually covered with like rough sand particles or pebbles. And a cool thing is that extremely long fulgurites have been discovered. Some sources say up to 20 meters in length though. That doesn't necessarily mean you can get it out intact. Because as you can imagine, it's like hard to extract a whole delicate glass tube of that length from the ground intact. Like I'm thinking it's kind of like the lightning has just cooked the sand. So you could imagine something like, I don't know, a cake. That is the cake is on the whole, not all that well cooked, but you have like this thread going through it that is really cooked. The thread going through the middle where part of the cake has been vaporized and left as a hollow. And then a section around that has been liquefied and then re-solidified in this glassy smooth inner channel and then a rougher surface around the outside. There are other types of fulgurite though. It's not just sand. There are rock fulgurites. These are a bit different. They usually appear as glassy layers or glassy crusts on top of a rock, often on mountain summits. So this is a really cool thing. If you go to the top of a mountain, you might find rocks near the very top have these little places that are like a dark, glassy patch on the rock. What is that? This is the place where the mountain has formed a natural lightning rod. Lightning is striking the rock and melting it and turning it into this glassy surface. Another thing is that when you see good examples of these really forked or branching fulgurites, sometimes they look like a cross between a ginger root and E.T.'s hand, but more gray and crusty usually. Also worth mentioning, sometimes artificial fulgurites can be formed by artificial injections of extreme heat and energy in the sand or rock. For example, by downed power lines or by arc welders, you can make human-made fulgurites that way. Charles Darwin actually talks at length about fulgurites in The Voyage of the Beagle. I was trying to remember when I was making the notes if this came up in our episode on ice formations, because in that one we were talking about Darwin's travels in South America, where he's going through a pass, going through what is today Chile and Argentina. But I don't think this came up. You remember in that passage, he has these misadventures going through the very high mountain pass where he and his companions try to boil potatoes, but the potatoes won't cook. Yes, yes. They're at very high altitude, so the boiling point of water is lowered, so the potatoes won't get hot enough when boiling them. But that's also the episode where he found the upside-down frozen horse in the pinnacles of ice. Yes. Yeah. But anyway, the part where he talks about finding fulgurites is in Chapter 3 of The Voyage of the Beagle called Maldonado, where Darwin is traveling in, what is I think, modern-day Uruguay. But I'm just going to read from Darwin here where he describes this find. Quote, In a broad band of sand hillocks, which separate the Laguna de Potrero from the shores of the Plata at the distance of a few miles from Maldonado, I found a group of those vitrified, siliceous tubes, which are formed by lightning entering loose sand. These tubes resemble, in every particular, those from Drigg in Cumberland, described in the geological transactions. He's referring to these other things that have been in the literature. The sand hillocks of Maldonado not being protected by vegetation are constantly changing their position. From this cause, the tubes projected above the surface, and numerous fragments lying near, showed that they had formerly been buried to a greater depth. Four sets entered the sand perpendicularly. By working with my hands, I traced one of them two feet deep, and some fragments which evidently had belonged to the same tube when added to the other part, measured five feet three inches. The diameter of the whole tube was nearly equal, and therefore we must suppose that originally it extended to a much greater depth. These dimensions are, however, small compared to those of the tubes from Drigg, one of which was traced to a depth of not less than 30 feet. Again, those incredibly deep ones. Wow. After this, he goes on describing them a little bit more. He talks about how they're vitrified, glossy, and smooth on the inside, and then rough on the outside. He compares the outside to a shriveled vegetable stalk, or to the bark of an elm tree. Also, he goes on to talk about some experiments that have been conducted in Paris, where they made artificial fulgurites by passing a very strong shock of galvanism into a finely powdered glass. They managed to recreate some of this effect. Let's see. There's one funny passage here. He says, when we hear that the strongest battery in Paris was used, and that its power on a substance of such easy fusibility as glass was to form tubes so diminutive, we must feel greatly astonished at the force of a shock of lightning, which striking the sand in several places has formed cylinders in one instance of at least 30 feet long, and having an internal bore when not compressed of full an inch and a half, and this in a material so extraordinarily refractory as quartz. Wow. So Darwin was not confused about what these things were. He already knew what they are that they're made by lightning, but I'm trying to imagine how interesting it would be to go out like he did and find these in the wild, protruding like he said, an area without much vegetation and these sand hillocks, where you're going out and because the sand shifts and moves, these glass formations are now sticking up into the air exposed and you look at them, I'd imagine, and say, like, what is that some kind of stalk or cactus or something, and then you come upon it and realize it is glass. Wow. Yeah. Just like alien formations growing up out of the sand. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess they eventually get broken off by the weather, but sometimes they're just having a good old poke up there. Yeah. So I wanted to also mention one scientific paper I came across because the authors of this paper did an interesting bit of calculation in their background section to estimate the rate of full-gurite formation on Earth. So this was a paper called a fossilized energy distribution of lightning. This is by Matthew Pasick and Mark Hearst published in Scientific Reports in 2016. I looked up the authors. Matthew Pasick is a geochemist who was at the time affiliated with the University of South Florida and Mark Hearst is an independent geologist. But the authors of this paper just start off by talking about how powerful lightning is. And of course, Darwin makes the same observation. He's looking at this fused glass and then saying like the most powerful battery in Paris could barely do anything close to this. So imagine how powerful lightning is. It defuses all the sand in this way. The authors here talk about that the total energy of a lightning strike might be up to 10 to the 9 joules and that lightning can heat the air around it to a temperature above 30,000 Kelvin. And of course, we think of lightning and its vast discharge of energy as primarily destructive. When you imagine what lightning can do, we think about things that it can hurt. You've got your standard bolt of vengeance from Jupiter, strikes a person dead, and then the ancient Romans might look at that in awe and build a shrine around that area. Jupiter has interacted with this place. Best not mess with it. When we think of putting it to use, it's generally going to be bringing a Frankenstein's monster to life or powering a time traveling DeLorean. And that's pretty much it. Those are the only applications. A bolt of lightning, yeah. So we can do that. We know also it can start fires, natural forest fires, and it causes destruction and damage to buildings. But the authors here just mentioned briefly a couple of things people might not appreciate about how lightning is also somewhat ecologically important. Like it does good things for us. This is a detour, but I thought it was interesting, so I just wanted to mention it. One thing that has come up on the show before, of course, is the ecological importance of lightning in starting forest fires. Like some amount of forest fires are necessary. Right. Like there are life forms that depend on occasional or periodic forest fires. There are plant seeds that are only activated in the presence of fire or smoke. So the life cycle of forests to some degree depends on occasional forest fires. But also the authors here bring up something that I don't think I'd ever read about before, that lightning plays a small role in nitrogen fixation on Earth, which nitrogen fixation is a process that we absolutely depend on for life. Nitrogen is a key component of amino acids and proteins. Without it, we could not make DNA or RNA or the proteins that build our cells. Plants couldn't make chlorophylls. So all life on Earth depends on nitrogen. And you might think, well, that's fine because there's plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere. Right. Like nitrogen is the main constituent of our atmosphere. But the form of nitrogen available in our atmosphere is actually not biologically usable. Atmospheric nitrogen exists mostly in the form of two nitrogen atoms bonded together called dinitrogen. And these two atoms are held together by an extremely strong chemical bond. So in order to be usable to life, you have to break that bond. Dihydrogen needs to be broken apart and converted into other compounds like nitrates, which are nitrogen oxygen compounds, or converted into ammonia, which is made of nitrogen and hydrogen. So what can break apart the dinitrogen, the two nitrogen atoms? The vast majority of the world's natural nitrogen fixation is done by microorganisms. So you have single-celled life forms like bacteria and archaea called diazetrophes, which have special enzymes called nitrogenases that are able to break the dinitrogen bonds and generate derivative compounds. So one example of this is rhizobia, which is a type of bacteria that exists symbiotically in the legume roots, like the roots of bean plants. And together with the plant, the bacterium and the plant are able to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia in age three. So most natural nitrogen fixation happens like that. But some small amount of the world's nitrogen fixation is also done by lightning. So lightning is hot enough to break apart dinitrogen in the atmosphere as it cuts a path to the ground. So it breaks apart the dinitrogen and makes it react with oxygen, other elements in the atmosphere, primarily oxygen. And then these nitrogen oxygen compounds are carried down to the ground by rain, and then they can be absorbed and used by plants in the form of nitrate. So lightning helps. Yeah, yeah. Something to keep in mind the next time we see some electrical activity in the storms. Like we're looking at a factory of sorts. Yeah. So anyway, coming to the part about fulgurites, the authors do some interesting math to calculate how often fulgurites around the world might be formed. And they just want to read this section. They say, quote, lightning is a ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth with a global flash rate of about 45 times per second. A majority, 75 to 90 percent of which occur over continental landmass. About a quarter of these strikes occur from a cloud to the ground, and hence the number of potential fulgurite forming events is significant with up to 10 fulgurites formed globally per second. Whoa. This estimate depends on the efficiency of fulgurite formation by lightning, which is highest when striking barren sand, soil or rock. So obviously there's going to be less formation when it's striking like a forested area. But still, that is significantly more than I would have guessed. Yeah. Now, one last thing I wanted to mention about fulgurites is actually not about fulgurites in sand. This is about rock fulgurites, but I thought this was interesting too. So I wanted to get into it. Rob, in the outline, I've got a picture you can look at of the peak of Mount Shasta in California. And you can see these dark scars in the rock. Yeah. And then there's a little bit of a reflection there. That's rock fulgurites. Oh, wow. The mountain is a lightning rod, and the peak is going to be struck by lightning, and it makes these glassy crusts in the rock. Wow. Yeah. To the untrained eye, you might just think, oh, it's like deposits of something, some sort of like mineral vein in the rock. But wow, that's fulgurite. Wow. So the last thing I want to talk about here is this news article in the Journal of Science from December 2020 by Nick Ogasa called Fossilized Lightning Bolts Reveal When Ancient Storms Struck. So when lightning strikes a mountaintop like this, like when it hits the peak of Mount Shasta, it leaves this glassy residue. And you can think of this in a way as fossilized lightning. It is a record in the rock of lightning hitting. So in a way, it is a record of weather projected into the rock or into the soil and the sand. And these fossilized signatures of thunderbolts can play an interesting role helping scientists understand past climate patterns by allowing them to date thunderstorms. So how does that work? Well, the article explains citing the work of Jonathan Castro, who is a volcanologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mines, that when naturally formed glasses like fulgurite and others like obsidian are exposed to the outside air and to the elements, they slowly begin to absorb water. And by measuring the amount of water they've absorbed and I think how deeply it's been absorbed. In theory, you should be able to measure the age of these glasses because they absorb slowly and so you can measure that. Or at least you can measure not necessarily the age since they're formed, but the age since they've been exposed to the elements. So for example, this has been considered as a method for dating artifacts like obsidian arrowheads. But there's a problem. And we figured out there are problems with the method because, quote, many of these glasses come from volcanoes and already contain water from the time they were forged. So that water interferes with this potential dating method. But Castro and colleagues reasoned that unlike volcanically forged obsidian, fulgurites could be free of this problem because the extremely high energy of the lightning strike that creates the fulgurite actually vaporizes any water that's hiding out in there because it's so hot. So fulgurite glass might be a more reliable target for this moisture absorption based dating method. So Castro and colleagues tested this out by making artificial rock fulgurite by shocking samples of rock with an arc welder. Again, these artificial things like when you have a downed power line and it makes fulgurite in the sand. They shocked rock with an arc welder reaching temperatures above 10,000 degrees Celsius, which is what's required to make the fulgurite. And these temperatures did indeed boil away almost all of the moisture, meaning that the fulgurite should serve as a reliable timepiece, allowing you to measure the time since its creation. And after this, the researchers decided to test the dating system on natural rock fulgurites, which they harvested from some volcanic mountain peaks in Oregon, in the U.S. State of Oregon, because again, mountain peaks are these lightning rods. And some of the fulgurites they sampled turned out to be hundreds of years old and they argued that this method could be used to date fulgurite glass with a relatively high level of accuracy compared to other methods. Other methods you might have like measuring bombardment by cosmic rays. So in a paper published in 2020 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Castro and co-authors wrote that, quote, because the lightning strike is in and of itself so effective at de-volatilizing melts in an instant, the resultant fulgurites are a unique earth material that record individual weather events, i.e., a thunderstorm and also longer term paleo weather intervals. And they talk about one interesting example of how this could be used. It could reveal when in history particular rocks or mountaintops became exposed and thus vulnerable to lightning strikes, for example, to identify when glaciers began to retreat from specific areas with a high degree of precision. Fascinating. Yeah. Huh. I admit I'm not a crystal guy. And if you start googling fulgurites, a lot of the people who want to talk about these things have thoughts about the powers of crystals. Oh, okay. There are certain powers attributed to fulgurites in particular. Well, I think some people, I don't know, I didn't go deep in that world. I just saw a bunch of Google hits and I'm like, okay, I don't have time for that. I'll research it the next time I'm in Asheville going to the various crystal stores. Yeah. So I'm not that kind of crystal guy, but now I'm kind of like I want some fulgurite. I'm very interested in this. I didn't get a chance to reread armor in full for this episode. I was just like zeroing in on the part that I referenced earlier. But this makes me wonder if there's an example in that book, maybe examples even in Dune, or certainly any book where you have any fictional setting where you have an interaction of some sort of energy weapon or dragon breath or Godzilla breath where you could potentially have like fulgurite scars of the back. And then you could have some sort of battle. You know, like I'm imagining like there was some sort of interaction here. We have last guns going off or some sort of energy weapons. And then later it could almost leave like a forest of fulgurite columns from where those like those missed laser beams or what have you impacted the sand and then the rest of the sand blew away. There are whole passages in Dune, Messiah where Paul is like looking out over the plains where the Fremen fought the Sardicar. And he talks about the landscape and even the rocks and the scarps and all that. But I don't think he ever mentions anything like that. I mean, it would be temporary, you know, because the elements would be weathering over time. Yeah. And you know, you can also imagine a scenario where things like this might be collected because they're essentially, you know, the Minto's of the battle, that sort of thing. But it's one of those things I kind of want to look out for now. And certainly listeners, if you were like, oh, yeah, there's a place in Game of Thrones where this is referenced. Again, it might actually be referenced elsewhere in Herbert's writing or any of the sources we've mentioned already. But it seems like there's some great potential there for fulgurite battle scars. I like it. Are there energy weapons in Game of Thrones? Well, you have dragons. Oh, OK. I'm thinking a breath weapon. OK. Or, you know, some sort of magical effects or, you know, other like high potency explosives, I don't know. But certainly dragon fire. It seems like that might be the kind of thing that could produce fulgurites in some cases. I don't know. In D&D, what level of electricity spells like lightning or thunderbolt spells do you have to get to to make fulgurite? I think it would happen right away. I mean, just as soon as you're able, if we get off the top of my head, I don't have my character sheet in front of me. I can't remember. You know, you get the lightning bolt spell and then you can like really ramp it up depending on what spell level you're casting at. But right out the gate, it's a pretty strong spell, especially if you can get your enemies to line up. That's my favorite part. You can get them wet, right? Yeah, but sometimes that's where you have to like make a case for it with your dungeon master. But if your dungeon master makes a mistake of lining up all of the villains, all of the bad guys, all the monsters in a row, and you're able to move your player to the side of them, you're able to flank them, then you can just like shoot that lightning bolt straight down the middle. And if they're made out of sand, you could create fulgurites. Oh, yeah. Are there sand-based enemies? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's some sand-based creatures. Yeah, for sure. There's some sort of lightning spells on like a rock elemental. Yeah, some sort of sand golem, that sort of thing. Yeah. Then you have a fulgurite golem, and that's a whole new thing you have to contend with. Okay, does that do it for today? I think so. Yeah, this has been a blast. You know, this is not our normal recording scenario, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Thanks to the studio here at Baha Mar. Great staff, great facilities. This has been a lot of fun. Totally, yeah. It's good seeing you in person, Rob. Yeah, yeah. Normally we're still doing the Zoom thing, so we're not in the same space when we do it. So, yeah, this has been a lot of fun. As always, we put the call out to listeners, though, if you have things you want to add to the talks we discussed here, certainly, you know, getting into the sci-fi visions, but also your own experience with sand, and even just where you fall on the whole love-hate relationship with beach sand right in, we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. We've been doing this for a long time at this point. You can find a pretty deep archive of Stuff to Blow Your Mind wherever you get your audio podcasts, and some of you out there are watching this in video form on Netflix. And you can find more recent episodes there, and we're going to continue to roll out that video content moving forward for the foreseeable future. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway, and a big thanks to our guest producer today, Carlisle. Carlisle. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at StuffToBlowYourMind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. 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