America’s first plutonium implosion test—its first detonated nuclear bomb—left the 100-foot (30-meter) tower that held it aloft, including all its copper wire, copper sheathing, and coaxial cables, completely vaporized . Almost instantaneously, the 21-kiloton fireball erupted into the New Mexico sky as Robert Oppenheimer initiated the July 16, 1945, Trinity test. The blast exposed the tower’s aerosolized metals and the sandstone desert dust beneath them to temperatures in excess of 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius). The pressure on these elements, roughly one million pounds per square inch, rivaled the pressures bearing down on rocks hundreds of miles underground where the Earth’s crust presses into its mantle. Small wonder, then, that physicists, geologists, and other researchers are still finding radical reconfigurations of the desert Southwest’s basic chemical makeup over 80 years later in what was once the Manhattan Project’s Alamogordo Bombing Range.…