CROSS SECTION

ANYWAY, the Trinity test was performed in the New Mexico desert, and it was so hot it turned the desert bed into a crater of lime green glass, know later as Trinitite.

This happened again when the US bombed Japan.

While looking to study microscopic shells in Motoujina Peninsula and Miyajima Island in Hiroshima, geologist Mario Warner found spheres of glass mixed in with the sand. He recognised them as similar to spherules caused by asteroid impacts (like the one that literally wiped out the dinosaurs).

The heat and movement of the glass turns the molten debris spherical, consistent with initial blast conditions of greater than 1800 C.

At the same time, Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s buildings infused the ‘Hiroshimaite’ as they were later called (god i hate that name). Wannier found iron and steel in the grains’ composition decades later.

So obviously ,,, i’m sat,,, and eating this up.

like this shit only gets made when a literal asteroid nearly wipes out all life ,,, and the Manhattan Project just like, did it at 5am one morning.

I really wanted to get a specimen of Trinitite from the Trinity explosion. Luckily for me, United Nuclear sells it and a whole bunch of other stuff i would love to buy. Also i love their website.

Sadly its $80 USD.

Linked to United Nuclear’s shop is a link to an independent analysis of the sample done by Hunter Scott, who determines it is in fact, Trinitite and the probable collection point in relation to the blast radius. Apparently, a lot of people sell fake trinitite so it warrants verification.

i didn’t understand most of it but then:

“IF YOU’RE LONELY, YOU CAN EAT 200 BANANAS TO GET THE SAME RADIATION EFFECTS AS SLEEPING NEXT TO SOMEONE”

are you fucking kidding me thats gorgeous.

but i was still confused. 200 bananas for 1 night????? or for a year???? I didn’t understand the maths enough to interpret his calculations, so i emailed him:

He responded the NEXT DAY:

What an absolute gem.

It was very simple, it turns out. The diagram that I refused to look at because it freaked me out had the information i needed.

But, talking to Hunter deepens the relationality of the research. His response encouraged me to consider how many people could connect themselves in some way to this substance. Also consciously setting up inter-disciplinary connections is something i want to do more; academic articles are all good and well but having someone answer a question in a way you understand is pretty spesh.

If I had’ve gone with the diagram, I wouldn’t have questioned the 1/2 banana = 8 hours sleeping with someone. Considering others claim it’s closer to 1.5 bananas, I’m cutting the difference and making it 1 banana per 8 hours.

Its a learning tool, not an exact representation, and the poetry of it isn’t lost whether the exact sieverts are correct or not (also, watch me deck someone in a crit/show/my studio doing the math to check).

anyway I developed my own conversion rate:

banana (g)	radiation (μsv)	time (x hrs)
1 g	0.0006666667 μsv	0.0533 hours (3 mins 12 seconds)
18.75 g	0.0126 μsv	1 hour
150 g (1 banana)	0.01 μsv	8 hour
450 g (3 bananas)	0.3024 μsv	24 hour

This means that 1 gram of banana has the equivalent radiation potency of 3 mins and 12 seconds of human contact, and so on.

There are other naturally occurring foods with high potassium levels like yam, parsley, dried apricots, milk, chocolate, all nuts, potatoes, bamboo shoots, bananas, avocados, coconut water, soybeans, and bran. Plantain has nearly double the amount of potassium as bananas. I could construct a Plantain Equivalent Dose for a culturally informed intervention.

There are other measurements that take the same form as the BED, like

• the Helen (measures beauty) – if Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, 1 millihelen would launch 1 ship.

• the gkB (measures irritation) – grams of crumbs to cm^2 in a bed.

• the Sheppey (1.4 km) – by Douglas Adams, the closest distance at which a sheep remains picturesque.

• the New York Second – the period of time between a traffic light turning green and the car behind you honking.

Ha ha funny . But what I like about the BED is i can work out per gram how much time/radiation the object is equivalent to.

I made these out of clay for an upcoming fundraiser for Unassigned Gallery. They are from left to right (by weight) the representational equivalent of 11.1, 10.6 and 9.3 hours of the radiation one would receive from human contact.

I combined a bunch of oil and pigment into the clay, it became this sebaceous mass that sweat as it dried; little beads of eucalyptus oil. There is also something in the correlation between skin pigment and protection from UV radiation. It could be interesting to incorporate melanin somewhere here. But that might be overcooking it.

I’m not sure where this will go with my practice. The connection between transmission and touch informs my interest; that the intimacy of sharing a bed with another person can be represented by a banana (not it the way you’d think) is good but needs context to understand.

There’s something about the banality of human tragedy/stupidity/decay that is a little funny. I could have tried to dust one of the glass particles from Hiroshima off my hot chips at the beach last summer.

Maybe, I gave up that time and just ate it.

Sources:

Mario M.A. Wannier, Marc de Urreiztieta, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Camelia V. Stan, Nobumichi Tamura, Binbin Yue,Fallout melt debris and aerodynamically-shaped glasses in beach sands of Hiroshima Bay, Japan, Anthropocene, Volume 25, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2019.100196 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213305419300074)

Analyzing Trinitite: A (Radioactive) Piece of Nuclear History