Lightning Can Shock Rocks At The Atomic Level

Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - 15:00 in Physics & Chemistry

Lightning Strikes John Fowler/Flickr CC by 2.0 What do a lightning strike and a meteorite have in common? Beyond the fact that they are both forms of death and destruction that fall from the sky, not much. One is a discharge of energy, the other is a solid object. But it turns out that both can have the same kind of impact on rocks, at a microscopic level. In a recent study researchers found that lightning can 'shock' tiny particles of quartz in a rock, forcing them to line up into bands called "shock lamellae," a feature previously thought to only form in the high temperatures and pressures of a meteorite impact. In order for the crystals to rearrange themselves on an atomic level to create the shock lamellae, the pressure has to be...

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