Can a nuclear explosion really turn the ground into "polished glass"?

Answer 1

yep.

The dominant effects of a nuclear weapon (the blast and thermal radiation) are the same physical damage mechanisms as conventional explosives, but the energy produced by a nuclear explosive is millions of times more per gram and the temperatures reached are in the TENS OF MILLIONS of degrees.

Answer 2

Not unless the entire ground was covered by a lot of sand.

Say that a nuke exploded in the middle of a desert, it still wouldn't work.
All the energy released would travel outwards from the center of the blast (like a single drop dropped on water), thus the sand would get super heated but they'd also get pushed outwards by the force of the nuclear blast. They'd get heated but all pushed outwards, not pressed together.

In this scenario, it is possible however that glass would form at the epicenter of the explosion cuz at that spot, the energy of the explosion would also be traveling downward, and that would create heat AND pressure, thus it that sand would indeed turn into sand.

There is however one other possibility,. Sand turns into glass when you heat it up to a certain temperature (im not sure what it is), but the heat from a nuclear explosion would be an infinite number of times greater than that required to turn sand into glass, so it is possible that this heat would break the bonds in the sand molecules at an atomic level thus separating electrons from protons and neutrons. My knowledge about this is not much, so I will not guess an answer, but this is a possibility.

Answer 3

Well...maybe. If you mean sheets of polished glass...no. If you mean crusts or beads of polished glass...yes.

The nukes tested at the Trinity site turned the sandy soil into little beads of glass. Sand is, after all, silicon for the most part. And the extreme heat from the fireballs melted and vaporized that sand. Upon cooling, as the vapor escaped the fireball and, later, when the fireball subsided, the vapor formed the little beads of glass.

Heavier chunks of sand, melted without vaporizing and becoming ejecta. These cooled and became the crusts. Check this out....

"The heat of the Trinity explosion melted the sandy soil around the tower to form a glassy crust known as "trinitite". Years later, with a view towards making the Trinity site a tourist-accessible national historic site (a plan that has never been carried out), the mildly radioactive crust was bulldozed into heaps and covered with soil." [See source.]

Answer 4

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Can a nuclear explosion really turn the ground into "polished glass"?

Answer 5

Yes, the heat and pressure is go great it will turn sand to glass. The flash from a nuclear explosion left shadows on walls and sidewalks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just before the body was reduced to atoms.

Lightning will also turn sand to glass if the bolt is strong enough.

Answer 6

Yup. For example; do you know what a "fulgurite"- is? It's soil (or sand -or whatever) thats been fused together by a bolt of lightning. It actually LOOKS & feels like crystalized glass. A nuclear explosion does exactly the SAME thing- only on a MUCH larger scale (not to mention making it SO radio-active that you can't DO anything with it- anyway). So if you know of someone who's playing around with Nuclear bombs, -tell them to knock it off. They're hazardous to our health... EVERYONE'S health. :(

Answer 7

Yes and no. Depends on the ground material. Take heat and sand and you make glass. Like beach sand, take a cutting torch to it and it will turn into glass. I use to do it all the time using my dads cutting torch when my parents were at the store. But a nuclear explosion would produce well enough heat to do it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitite. This will explain some to you.

Answer 8

The intention of Israel is to have settlements all the way to the Jordan River, and in Gaza as well. Their last chance for real peace died when Livni wasn't able to get enough for a majority government.

Answer 9

Yes. Not polished though.

Answer 10

if you want it to!!

but i doubt it!