I’m very tired. Please help me understand this.
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Can you flash melt a whole outcrop of rock and then quench it very quickly? Yes? Then you’ve got glass.
Practically, that is very hard to do due to the insane amount of energy required to melt a whole cliff of rock or whatever, then when you cool it it’s going to cool quickly on the outside and slowly on the inside, so that it crystallises beyond a few inches or so of the outer layer which would turn to glass.
The outer glass margin would not be a clear glass due to all the impurities in rock, it would be a dark colour (like obsidian). We often see this in rock which has been intruded by magma and then the magne body has just sat there cooling off until it crystallises. The magma body becomes igneous rock (Google ‘pluton’ to see what I mean) and the margins of both the igneous intrusion and the surrounding rock which was intruded into are often known as ‘chilled margins’ and are an inch or so of glassy material because it cooled off too quick to crystallise into a bunch of minerals.
You may also be interested in [fulgurites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite) which are — poetically speaking — fossilised lightning strikes, or more literally they are the grains of quarts and silica rich minerals on a sandy beach that got struck by lightning, melted and fused together, then quickly cooled in a tube like structure which is made of glass. Its natural, so it’s somewhat messy and ugly compared to glassware or glass ornaments (which have been carefully crafted), but it’s definitely glass in the sense that it is an amorphous solid.
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