Fulgurit from the Collection of the LWL-Museum for Natural History, Münster

Fulgurite
Found in 1985
210 x 26 x 5 cm
On loan from the R. Riedinger Collection, LWL-Museum of Natural History, Münster

Fulgurites are figuratively referred to as fossilised lightning. They are rare phenomena in which released energy leaves a permanent form in sandy soil. Since the beginning of time, lightning has been striking and reshaping the surface of our planet by discharging energy. This impact generates heat of over 30,000 degrees Celsius. If the impact occurs on sand, it liquefies in the immediate vicinity. Although a lightning discharge lasts less than a thousandth of a second, the temperature is so high that the sand not only melts, but practically boils. If the sand cools quickly, a fulgurite can form. It is the combination of several natural circumstances that produce such lightning tubes. They appear as glassy, tubular and hollow objects. Thanks to the loan of the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster from the R. Riedinger Collection, the exhibition features one of the world’s largest existing specimens. It was found on the edge of an open-cast mine in 1985.

The connection between energy and matter, between trace and time, accompanies the visitor through this exhibition. Energy as an essential state variable that makes all natural processes possible in the first place; as the active force of life, which acts from atomic elementary particles to cells, for complex bodies and as the pulse of the whole cosmos. And so the exhibition The Presence of Absence begins symbolically with a phenomenon that is localised in geology and mineralogy. The active force of the fleeting lightning bolt leaves a trace that forms a shape. This fragile object is the materialised form of a great creative force that imprints itself into physical matter in a fraction of a second.