Hey, let's go check out that asteroid that fell last night . . .
There is also tektite glass used for some stuff for King Tut, and the source of that has apparently been identified. :')Wabar ImpactDeep in the legendary Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia-the Rub' al-Khali-lies a strange area, half a square kilometer (over 100 acres) in size, covered with black glass, white rock and iron shards. It was first described to the world in 1932 by Harry St. John "Abdullah" Philby, a British explorer perhaps better known as the father of the infamous Soviet double-agent Kim Philby. The site he depicted had been known to several generations of roving al-Murra Bedouin as al-Hadida, "the iron things." What he found was neither the lost city of Ubar nor the basis for the Qur'anic story. But it was certainly the setting of a cataclysm that came out of the skies: the arrival of a meteorite. Judging from the traces left behind, the crash would have been indistinguishable from a nuclear blast of about 12 kilotons, comparable to the Hiroshima bomb. Wabar-size meteoroids are much more common-and harder for astronomers to spot-than the big monsters. Ironically, until the Wabar expeditions, we knew the least about the most frequent events. The slag and shocked rock in the deserts of Arabia have shown us in remarkable detail what the smaller beasts can do.
SciAm
Nov 1998
Hey, let's go check out that asteroid that fell last night . . .