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 fulgerites, or petrified lightning.

This specimen is a fulgerite which was collected from the Sahara in northern Africa. Each fulgerite is housed in a glass-topped riker display box measuring 4x3x1". A small information card accompanies the specimen, which also serves as the certificate of authenticity.

For protection, we've wrapped each fulgurite inside a small bubble wrap pouch inside the riker case. When your fulgurite arrives, remove it from the case and unwrap it. Then, you can place it back inside the riker case.

Additionally, we also have several larger sized fulgerites which are priced individual. You can see all the fulgerites in our 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.