Some nanoparticles occur naturally when nature synthesizes them under certain conditions – by comminution & dispersion and nucleation & growth. For example, comminution (a process of making something large into small particles) occurs during a rocky landslide, and nucleation (the formation of a minimally stable unit capable of growing further) occurs as the initial stage of condensation (following evaporation). So, nanoparticles are always being created and meeting others and forming groups; some nanoparticles grow huge, but are then targets for comminution, hence their nanoscale journey is cyclical, it never ends.
Here I am, floating in the blue void, freer than anything else I know—isn't life wonderful?
It all began in a cataclysm. I don't know what happened. There was rumbling, grinding, crashing. Rock upon rock. It was awful. Maybe it was an earthquake. Maybe decades of rain and frost finally broke off a giant rock. I don't know, because I had no independent identity before it happened. A cataclysm released me from my parent's block -- Alpine granite 3000 metres above the sea, and I became a free nanoparticle.
I am quite complex. If you want to know me, you have to know my entire life history -- including how my parent's rock was formed, in primordial, fiery cataclysms. Later, that granite was pitilessly crushed together, 5 million years ago, and folded up toward the sky. And then relentless erosion set in -- wind, water and ice, until the end came -- and I was born.