With a crack, lightning appears for just a moment and fills the world with light. Though the electricity in the sky is fleeting, it can leave its mark on the world for years to come.

When lightning finds its way into sand, through the desert or a beach, the powerful heat of the electricity flash melts the grains and instantly creates a glassy silica stone. These stones are called fulgurites, or petrified lightning.

This specimen is a large fulgurite which was collected from the Sahara in northern Africa. This fulgurite is shipped in a sturdy carton along with bubble wrap for protection and comes with an informational photo card that serves as a certificate of authenticity.

Each of our larger sized fulgurites are unique and sold separately by price. You can see the frozen nodules of silica which have been turned to glass by the power of the lightning in each one.

Additionally, we also have a smaller sized set of fulgurites which come in one of our riker display cases. You can see all sizes of our available fulgurites in the collection below.

"The tube is sometimes thick as a finger or thumb sometimes as a feather quill... Sometimes if one knows them and is on the lookout they can be seen shining forth out of the earth." ~ Pastor David Hermann, first recorded observation of fulgurites in 1706

To most of us, lightning is a "bolt from the blue"—a flash of light breaking out of the clouds. It strikes the ground then fades to black against the crash of thunder. Dramatic as this sounds, the mechanics of lightning are very complicated.

A lightning strike is like two fingers coming together. An ionized column of air known as a leader works its way down from the clouds, meeting up with a similar column rising from the ground. As these two columns connect, a return stroke moves from the ground to the clouds creating the bright light we know as lightning. The amount of current moving through this connection is enormous and superheated air around the bolt explodes; this is what we call thunder.

When the ground is composed of dry sand, the intense heat melts and fuses the silica creating tubes of rough glass called fulgurites. The process happens quickly, often trapping molecules from the surrounding atmosphere inside the walls of the impact tube. These complex, branching structures sometimes reach over 40' in length.

Today, scientists use fulgurites as natural time capsules. Extracted from fossil dunes which preserve the delicate structure, microspectroscopic analysis of trapped gasses within the fulgurites provide a view to climates thousands of years old in regions where weather patterns have changed dramatically.