The beaches in Japan are dotted with Hiroshima's melted remains

If you look closely at the beaches of the Motoujina Peninsula in Japan, you will find that the sand is littered with tiny glass beads with strange shapes of tears, as if they had been thrown from the sky.

It is not surprising that these unusual objects are the relics of atomic bombs dropped on Japan during the last days of the Second World War. As reported in the newspaper Anthropocenethese debris – nicknamed "Hiroshimaites" – are essentially the remains of the city that were blown into the heavens, cooked in an atomic cloud and then rained.

While browsing the sands of Hiroshima Bay and Miyajima Island, geologist Mario Wannier began noticing these glass spots and embarking on a journey to discover how they had been created. In the sand samples collected by him and his team, they discovered that spheroids and other unusual particles accounted for up to 2.5% of all grains.

Although very unusual, the tiny structures reminded Wannier of other sediment samples he had analyzed at that time in the Cretaceous.Paleogene border, better known as an asteroid annihilated the dinosaurs There are 66 million. Whatever structures were forged, it was an incredibly epic energy – and as they were discovered a few miles from the epicenter of the nuclear explosions that occurred just 74 years ago, the source of this energy was obvious.

The morning of August 6, 1945, the United States dropped "little boy" on the city of Hiroshima, marking the second explosion of an atomic bomb and the first nuclear weapon ever used in war. More than 70% of the city was destroyed in the blink of an eye, as well as at least 70,000 people died instantly. It is estimated that more than 200,000 people died in the following years due to injuries and radiation.

"It was by far the worst man-made event," Wannier said in a statement. declaration. "To the surprise of finding these particles, the big question for me was: you have a city and a minute later you have no city. The question was: "Where is the city – where is the material?" It's a treasure to have discovered these particles. It's an incredible story. "

Further analysis of Hiroshimaites showed a wide variety of chemical compositions, including concentrations of aluminum, silicon and calcium. However, some were composed only of iron and steel, or even concrete, marble, stainless steel and rubber.

"Some look like we have meteorite impacts, but the composition is quite different," says co-author Rudy Wenk, professor of mineralogy at the University of Berkeley. "There were quite unusual shapes, there was pure iron and steel, some of them had the composition of building materials."

Of course, the research team concluded that only an atomic explosion could trigger such a strange composition.

The team then hopes their research will encourage additional testing of the samples to determine if samples contain radioactive elements. They would also like to travel to Nagasaki, the Japanese city hit by the Fat Man atomic bomb in the United States three days later, to see if similar structures can be found.