I’m very tired. Please help me understand this.
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Like melting different sized ice cubes- different sizes melt at different rates, and smaller pieces melt faster, because 100rams of tiny ice cubes has a lot more surface area than a solid cube of 100g of ice. (Which is why ice spheres are popular in whiskey drinking-they have the least surface area and melt the slowest).
A regular kiln for making ceramics (sand-sized pieces of rocks+minerals, that are melted together to fuse them) top out around 2400f/1300c. As many have pointed out, quartz mineral is almost all silica- which is the primary mineral for glass. Quartz melts at about about 3,000f/1670c. And we probably have industrial kilns that can do that temp.
So- like melting a big piece of ice- it would talk more energy for more time to melt a big piece of quartz into liquid than it would to throw that quartz into a grinder, to make a powder with LOTS of surface area, and turn that into the same liquid to pour.
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