About 4,000 years ago, humans were able to make glass. Before 1000 BC, the advent of “glass blowing” greatly improved the level of human glass making. Since then,glass has gradually been integrated into human life. Glass was manufactured and used in large quantities, and some glass products have survived to this day.
The glass bottle has been around since ancient Roman times, and archaeologists have found it to be about two thousand years old. It can be seen that after so long,those glass bottles are still well preserved, and the years seem to have left no traces.
There are various speculations about how long it can be stored in nature. Some people say it is tens of thousands of years, some say it is hundreds of thousands of years,and some people think that glass bottles in nature can survive for 2 million years.
Why can glass bottles exist for a long time in nature?
The main component of glass is silica, and in addition to other silicates,the atoms in glass are liquid-like disordered in the overall microstructure and macroscopically exhibit the characteristics of many solids.A special form of matter is called an “amorphous solid”, also known as a “vitreous body”.
Although the atoms inside the glass are generally irregular, if the scope of observation is greatly narrowed,it can be found that their adjacent atoms are arranged in a certain order, which is the so-called “short-range order”.
This special structural unit makes the glass have the characteristics of high temperature resistance, corrosion resistance,oxidation resistance and high hardness,so it is widely used in the production of glass bottles of various shapes.
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Since glass is composed of various compounds, the physical and chemical properties of saturated glass are very stable, and it is not easy to undergo chemical reactions,so it will not be affected by various microorganisms in nature.
If there is strong alkali or hydrofluoric acid in the surrounding environment, the life of the glass bottle will not be too long.
There is basically no such special environment in nature, so how are glass bottles generally decomposed by nature? Can you imagine? “I threw the bottle on the ground and it exploded!” This is what the physics teacher said,thought and did to his students. The answer is physical shock.
Everyone knows that glass is easy to break, so after a long period of natural water, wind, glacier movement and other external forces,glass bottles will continue to be physically impacted. The glass bottle will be broken after rolling, impacting and friction,and then from large pieces to small pieces, and so on, and finally into extremely fine particles, which are integrated with nature.
This shows that how long the glass bottle can be stored in nature actually depends on the surrounding environment,so it can be considered that if the glass bottle is in a very stable environment, and various external forces in nature cannot act on it,then the glass bottle can be Protected by nature. It can exist for more than two million years.