- 3335 - COMET - strikes Chile. Heat from a comet exploding just above the ground fused the sandy soil into patches of glass stretching 75 kilometers. This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface
--------------------- 3335 - COMET - strikes Chile
- 12,000 years ago, a comet scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin.
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- Those minerals closely match the composition of material returned to Earth by NASA's Stardust mission, which sampled the particles from a comet called “Wild 2“.
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- Those mineral assemblages are likely the remains of an extraterrestrial object, most likely a comet with a composition similar to Wild 2, that streamed down after the explosion that melted the sandy surface below.
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- This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface. To have such a dramatic effect on such a large area, this was a truly massive explosion.
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- The glasses are concentrated in patches across the Atacama Desert east of Pampa del Tamarugal, a plateau in northern Chile nestled between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west.
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- Fields of dark green or black glass occur within a corridor stretching about 75 kilometers. There's no evidence that the glasses could have been created by volcanic activity.
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- The glasses show evidence of having been twisted, folded, rolled and even thrown while still in molten form. That's consistent with a large incoming meteor and airburst explosion, which would have been accompanied by tornado-force winds.
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- The analysis found minerals called “zircons” that had thermally decomposed to form “baddeleyite.” That mineral transition typically happens in temperatures in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
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- The analysis also turned up assemblages of exotic minerals only found in meteorites and other extraterrestrial rocks. Specific minerals like cubanite, troilite and calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions matched mineral signatures from comet samples retrieved from NASA's Stardust mission.
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- More work needs to be done to establish the exact ages of the glass, which would determine exactly when the event took place. But the tentative dating puts the impact right around time that large mammals disappeared from the region.
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- It's too soon to say if there was a causal connection or not, but what we can say is that this event did happen around the same time as when we think the megafauna disappeared.
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- Heat from a comet exploding just above the ground fused the sandy soil into patches of glass stretching 75 kilometers. This is the first time we have clear evidence of glasses on Earth that were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface
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- There may be lots of these blast scars out there, but until now we haven’t had enough evidence to make us believe they were truly related to airburst events. This site provides a template to help refine our impact models and will help to identify similar sites elsewhere around the globe.
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- November 9, 2021 COMET - strikes Chile 3335
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