Glass in the Atacama Desert. Credit: PH Schultz / Brown University.
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About 12,000 years ago, at the end of the youngest ice age, something burned a large area of the Atacama Desert in Chile with immense heat. He was so extreme that he sintered masses of desert sand into ghostly pieces of quartz glass. They occur in a belt about 75 kilometers long. New research into the placement and composition of these strange pieces of glass has led scientists to wonder what it might be.
Peter H. Schultz. Kredit: Brown University.
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Pete Schultz of Brown University in the USA and a team of colleagues discovered unmistakable signs that glass in the Atacama Desert was created by a wild explosion near the earth’s surface. According to Schultz, given the size of the affected area, it must have been a truly extraordinary explosion. The glass is located east of the Pampa del Tamarugal plain in northern Chile, which is part of the Atacama Desert. It is a breathtaking landscape where, among other things, geoglyphs are found. Not far to the north, the Gigante de Atacama (Atacama Giant), the largest prehistoric anthropomorphic figure in the world, 119 meters long, was discovered.
Same minerals as in material from Comet Wild 2. Credit: PH Schultz / Brown University.
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The origin of glass has been a mystery for many years. According to Schultz, there is not a single piece of evidence that glass is formed by any volcanic activity. In the past, large-scale vegetation fires were considered a possible cause, but Schultz’s team ruled it out. The character of the glass does not correspond to this. All indications are that the Atacama glass was formed during a huge explosion, which was accompanied by extremely strong tornadoes and winds.
Atacamský obr. Credit: Emilio Erazo-Fischer / Wikimedia Commons.
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Chemical analyzes of the glass showed that it contained zircons, which were converted to baddeleyite, a zirconia that is rarely found. This conversion occurs when the ambient temperature exceeds a temperature of about 1,650 ° C. This would be very difficult during a fire of grasses and bushes. Researchers have also discovered in the glass exotic minerals that are typically found in meteorites and other extraterrestrial materials, such as samples from the US Stardust mission, which collected particles from Comet Wild 2.
Schultz and his colleagues are convinced that a comet or part of it exploded over the Atacama Desert 12,000 years ago. Confirmation of the results, accurate dating of the event and specification of the nature of the body that arrived at the time, but will still require further research. Recently, it has been shown that similar events may not be rare in Earth’s history, so we are probably still waiting for interesting discoveries.
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