‘Alexandrian’ glass confirmed by hafnium isotopes

The chemistry of zircons is pretty cool. A non-technical terrible analogy is they're like nearly indestructible test tubes that bottle up whatever contaminants are in the area when they initially crystallized and then they sit there for eternity or until lava melts them (and some lavas aren't hot enough to melt them, whoa!).

So various natural variations in Hf isotopes by location are bottled up by zircons, and when melted into ancient glass the glass liquifies at a half or third the temp required to liquify zircon crystals, so they sit there with evidence of where the materials came from bottled up for all eternity.

Zircon also shows up in radwaste schemes. Despite mother nature and humanities best efforts we generally haven't destroyed zircons over centuries, so it seems a useful strategy to bottle up radwaste in giant zircon crystals.

Weird fact, most zircons are stable at boiling iron temperature. Note I wrote boiling, not melting iron. Liquid tungsten is hot enough, sure, but not mere liquid iron.

Its a pity zircons are structurally useless. Of course it would be a recycling nightmare if they were industrially useful for bulk structures and components. Interesting sci fi aspect, all the chemists I've talked to are certain that Pierson's Puppeteer General Products space ship hulls were based on the idea of industrial zircons as a structural material although in one story those hulls were proposed to be a carbon fiber analog of zircons or something like that. A "zircon polymer", should such a magical material exist, would make an interesting structural material when threads of it were knitted into 3d shapes.

- How colorful Roman architecture was in its heyday. Some of the preserved interiors are full of rich wall paintings with some fairly modern abstract bits in the them. It's nothing like we see today.

- How much brick the Romans used. I remember wandering around looking at some ruins and dismissing some walls as "must be some 19th century stuff" only to realize that those brick walls were the original from a couple thousand years ago.

- How close Rome was to mass manufacturing. I remember learning for the first time how many Roman statues were the result of the client choosing a precarved heroic torso they liked from a dealer, and then an artist producing a suitable custom bust to fit the headless torso. The two were simply fitted together and voila, instant statue and less posing time for busy patrons.

- Roman glassware. The first time I saw it in a museum I passed it by, again thinking it must be some late 19th century early 20th century stuff. Romans just had pottery and such didn't they? No! Their tableware would not look too outlandish sitting at a place setting in a modern context today -- or at least as suitable flower vases.

Progress can be achieved like no other when the project leader is the one who not only has outstanding instrumental expertise, but also performs the _experiments_ themselves.

Consistently over half a dozen major projects per year, this is high-performance operation.

If you're not dedicated to taking good care of your instruments, they won't even function the entire year.

For quantitation we've got one of the expensive benchtop models (and a retired one to restore), but they've got a _real_ expensive forklift model in addition, which makes this type of isotope analysis possible.

Only one reason I don't do any geochemistry or archaeology either, just produce boring old invoiceable paperwork.

I see what you did there...