oh okay i see it cool we gotta go up there
okay yes there's probably some in this in this wall right here and as it rains
it get that thing out of my face joe's
looking iconic better go find some fulgurites
look at this
unknown to most people there is an ancient sand dune system
hidden in central florida it's known as the cypress head formation
and this locality is famous for one particular thing
Fulgurites which are the remains of ancient lightning strikes that hit these
sand dunes nearly five million years ago the best
way to find fulgurites is to go where these ancient sand dunes are
and today that's exactly what we're gonna do
right now we are in a private sand mine near bartow florida
we're gonna be joined by the southeastern geological society
which i'm the VP of and Dr Matt Pasek who is the world's leading scientist on
fulgurites and their significance
Fulgurite right there first one of the day
little guy right there
here we are here's the exposure and i can see
one small fulgurite peeking out right there
beautiful a second slightly bigger one coming out right here
oop just broke really delicate though and then there's a third i saw peeking
out earlier yep right up there differential erosion
awesome Fulgurite it's really really cool and
now we're going to try to catch lightning in a bottle
literally and once we have this bottle full of fulgurite we'll go find Dr
Pasek who'll hopefully be able to teach us
more about these awesome pieces of history so wish us luck
as we go catch lightning in a bottle there's another one right
up there I hear Kat and katy being crazy over there this mine is awesome
there's so much good stuff again there's that fulgurite and
there's a little mini one right there i'll have to find a really
nice one to dig up soon oh
and over here without me even realizing it in the shadow right here
it's a really cool one oh this place is loaded today absolutely loaded
so there's this one right here and then there's that one sticking up see how
it's sticking out so you can either watch out for the the
one i just started right here so here's our first fulgurite
of the day i'm gonna go ahead and clean it up
and see if she isn't pretty oh that's a cool one
it's really wide and pancaked
it's a really unique shape get this one that's cool i'm gonna get
as many pieces as i can put them down there and then wash them
off then i've got another one right over here that i'm gonna excavate
in just a little bit then after i get these two up i might do
some more scouting i see cris and kyle, paleocris and wild kyle
coming this way
let's show them what they're looking for all right so here's a couple pieces
so this one's really weird it's pancaked so it's not really tubular
but it's um okay it's a nice piece it's coming out
right there there was another one right over here
it's a really thin one there it is see the pieces of glass coming out
that's your normal size and then do you see that one erupting right there
yep okay yeah so that's another one there's gonna be fulgurites in every
bit of sand so cris and kyle have gone off to find their own fulgurites
and i've started excavating the one i found just a second ago
and it is freaking beautiful it's going down this long curve
i might try to get rid of this sand this the shadow's gone
so you guys can see a better view of it it's awesome
this is what we're looking for that is a two foot long
lightning strike at least the evidence of one
the amount of energy it would have taken to form that is insane
really beautiful to see it naturally in situ like that
such a cool event and such a cool piece of history
fulgurites man fossilized lightning strikes that's crazy looking a little
further and it started fracturing so i'm gonna grab this piece and put
them in my lightning catcher for today it's awesome
yeah i saw rock that's a rock i'm sorry but these aren't rocks those are the
fulgurites i just managed to grab they're gonna go in the lightning
catcher and i'm gonna start excavating that one
and maybe switch between these two cool stuff literally catching
lightning in a bottle piece by piece that's so cool one of the reasons we
find so many fulgurites here is that we're close to tampa which is
where i grew up in tampa happens to be the lightning
capital of the united states getting more
lightning strikes than any other u.s city interestingly
enough the word tampa actually comes from the
native american Calusa language and loosely translated
it means burning tree or sticks of fire and it's
commonly thought that that word actually represented all
those lightning strikes that would hit in the tampa bay region
and cause fires so you've got this history
from five million years ago when these fulbrights were formed
to the relevance with native american cultures referring to the lightning
strikes and then even now we've got these
pretty areas and we can go to these awesome places
and find them it's really really cool love this stuff dude what's that right
there that's another one right there yeah
yep i can't get that one yet because i got to excavate that one and move up
it's cool though do you want to come look at the fulgurites and the lightning
catcher yes i do let's go take a look these all the ones
you just dug out from over here yeah and they're pretty awesome i might
have to go back and get some more if this one over here
doesn't pan out pretty right chunky chunky chunky boy
yeah the chunky boy they came out in like pancake sizes wow
look at that really beautiful interesting formation
Dr Pasek was saying that it probably um used to be a slope when the lightning
hit it - I sound like a geologist, interesting formation huh huh -
it was probably a slope and that's why it pancaked out and then i became a tube
i said whoop i'm so clumsy a tube as it went back
into the sand very cool yeah i found all that
climbing i found two small ones that's it they were way too small they
just crumbled and you got to get the scent
the scent of the fulgurites i really thought i was gonna get something good
that one's just like hurry up that one's like sticking out i want you to get that
i'll get it okay i'll get it that one's sticking out too
okay i'll leave
all right time to excavate this beauty see what we can't expose so this one's a
lot more delicate than the last one and it's in really hard compact sand i
did manage to get this small piece exposed
really beautiful fulgurite i'll get that out
and then i'm gonna start digging that last one again super cool
it's too bad this one was really fragile but there's more to be dug up yet
so freaking cool fossilized well pseudo fossilized
lightning strikes the evidence of powerful
events of nature it's awesome i got way up here
scouting for more but i don't see any so yeah apparently team b already got
them i'm gonna go back to where my good one
is spend the rest of the day digging that up
then i'll take it to Dr. Pasek and see what he thinks about it
really so happy to be here here we go
mountain goat - so this is actually the beach
and it's crazy to think that this area 5 million years ago
used to be beach property, really boggles the mind
let's catch more lightning here's the cross section right up here
and it keeps going down this way unfortunately we're out of
water so i'm just gonna have to grab pieces of this
and we'll wash it off later thanks to some friends of mine
who donated some lovely water we were able to
expose this brilliant fulgurite that is freaking brilliant that is a
lightning strike that would have traveled all the way
down to the water table five million years ago and that water
table way down there maybe 20 feet below was the conductor
the lightning was trying to get to and that enormous amount of energy
formed this beautiful glass tube there is literally nothing
better than experiencing natural history firsthand i'm going to
try to get this piece out as few sections as possible
all right there's my last bit of lightning for the day and then we're
going to go talk to Dr. Pasek and get wrapped up and out of here yes
sir i see some Fulgurites in that there box
that is awesome killer job dude so one of my favorite things about stuff
like this is you can get family people you love and care about out
interested in geology that one's brilliant let me get out of
the shadow this one was just laying on the ground
it wasn't even buried that's a sick piece of lightning
can you believe that a lightning's like five million years ago created that
are you on still no you're good go grab more there's more in there
yeah that is awesome
very cool very cool
i think i've spotted a very smart person right there let's go talk to him
there he is how's it going oh very nice very nice too much hunting yourself
i did we uh have to check my son yeah i saw zach over there i tried to
steal his fulgurites
he's had enough that he's probably like huh okay you can take him now
his joys in finding him well you want to see what i grabbed today
so really weird pancake one let's get this out but there's some
pieces right in the big gray color too i know can you tell me more about the
color the color tends to be related to how many bubbles there are
so the more bubbles you have generally the darker it gets
so the ones that are chock full of bubbles
and that's probably from you know water that got hit
and vaporized when it was forming it just fills it with bubbles and it makes
it a lot more opaque so this rock here is an interesting combination of
sedimentary metamorphic and igneous so the
definition of an igneous rock is that it forms from a melt
and since this is glass and glass is the cooling product of melt this is
an igneous rock but it is also capturing sand on the outside and
cementing it and so the cementing of sediment such as sand is also the
definition of a sedimentary rock and finally when you heat rock and
change its structure and its mineralogy so by definition of
metamorphic rock a fulgrite is actually all three that's crazy
metamorphic igneous and sedimentary so we have a nice large fulgurite right
here this one was found about 10 years ago
that's the mothership this is the mothership right so there
we have a strike that would have made would have been a wrecking ball for sure
and so the energy here would have been associated probably
with uh uh several megajoules of energy and a megajoule
is really a lot of energy and so this one probably came
and if it struck somebody this would have ruined
their day and probably that would have been the end of it
there'd be no more person left one more person this is this is
well how much person would be left if they got struck by my fulgurite so if
this one had gotten hit on the edge right here it would probably
it depends if it's a direct strike or if it goes through certain physiological
ways you can probably survive this one okay
that one no i mean that one that one this one's a truck going 400 miles per
hour this one here is probably a car going 45
okay which would you know if you had a glancing blow i mean i'm young but i
don't think i could take that still i couldn't either full on right that's
awesome so that that's a nice one this one has been
squished probably from when the lightning struck it was on a hill
and got the hill probably rebounded a bit and squished it right before it
froze into glass so do most of lightning strikes not
actually create a Fulgurite that we see now
um most lightning strikes that strike ground will create in fact it's probably
estimated about 90 percent of all cloud to ground lightning
that hits something that can form a fulgurite will form a fulgurite okay
and about 25 percent of all lightning strikes actually will hit the ground
75 percent stay in the sky and don't do anything so those of course won't form
any fulgurites awesome thank you so much Dr.
Pasek love this stuff this is cool what are
you doing man do you find any fulgurites or just find that yeah look i
found a fork one have you ever seen oh my god oh
dude you found a killer one yeah see lucky baby
no it's mine
joe you killing me i'm gonna touch your fulgurite don't touch the one with the
forget it no one's really fragile
proud of you buddy
all right look at this group picture
that's nice what do you guys find
yeah definitely they beat all of us i think they did probably i don't know
you guys found some cool stuff yeah lots of climbing
lots of climbing
what you guys are killing me
yeah cause we need to dig out hand holes and footholds yeah
all right we are officially out of the mine but before i
sign off today i wanted to take you guys to a quick trip
to one of my local beaches and show you the best of my fulgurites
now that they are nice and clean and restored so let's do it
all right guys we managed to make it to the beach and i have my
favorite fulgurites from today's trip at over a
foot long it was originally in nine different pieces that i had to
painstakingly put back together and restore and while
this was my favorite piece of lightning that we were able to catch today
we did manage to find a lot more than just that
we found a whole handful of museum quality fulgurites each one by
themselves would have been a trip maker it's crazy to think that this
environment we are in right now was the exact environment of
the sand mines we were in earlier today even though those mines
are 40 miles inland of this point fulgurites are one
of florida's most unique pieces of natural history
all owing to their unique and crazy relationship with lightning
their florida's only metamorphic rock they are florida's only igneous rock
and they are the only rock that is metamorphic igneous and sedimentary
all at the same time i'm really thankful that i was able to organize this trip
to my leadership position with the southeastern geological society
and i am even more thankful that you guys were able to come out
and enjoy this trip with me and learn from experts like Dr. Pasek
who have such a deep and rich knowledge in these scientific subjects
and as always guys if you enjoyed the video please make sure to like
share and subscribe and don't forget to check out my friends cris' and kyle's
youtube channels link in the description below and as
always keep on digging science and until next
time
that is so cool
say hi babe hi babe
that is really cool