Talked to a retired geologist at a diner about 9/11 dust samples

He told me the composition of the dust at Ground Zero had microscopic spheres that shouldn't be there from just a building collapse. Said he'd seen similar particles only in controlled demolitions. Has anyone else heard about these specific particle types in the debris analysis?

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ninas703mo ago

Pulled up some old EPA reports from 2002 that mention those exact spheres. They called them "microspherules" and linked them to high-temperature events like thermite reactions.

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shane_ross3mo ago

Whoa wait, hold on. The EPA actually had reports on this stuff from way back in 2002? I never heard about any of that before. So they were already looking at these little spheres and connecting them to some kind of super hot chemical reaction? That changes a lot of what I thought I knew about this whole thing.

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the_mason2mo ago

...so I was actually talking to a buddy of mine who used to work for the EPA back in the early 2000s, and I asked him about that report you mentioned. He kinda laughed and said yeah, they had a whole internal thing about those microspherules and the initial findings got buried under a ton of other paperwork. Apparently the lab guys who found them were pretty freaked out because the chemical signature just didn't match anything natural they could find. He said they even tried to replicate it with regular explosives and it didn't create the same kind of spheres. I mean, it's pretty wild that this stuff was sitting in a file cabinet for over twenty years before anyone really dug into it.

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