Posted on 11/02/2021 11:20:28 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Around 12,000 years ago, something 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. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno.
In a study published in the journal Geology, researchers show that samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin. 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. The team concludes that those mineral assemblages are likely the remains of an extraterrestrial object—most likely a comet—that streamed down after the explosion that melted the sandy surface below.
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. 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, Schultz says, so their origin has been a mystery.
Some researchers have posited that the glass resulted from ancient grass fires, as the region wasn't always desert. During the Pleistocene epoch, there were oases with trees and grassy wetlands created by rivers extending from mountains to the east, and it's been suggested that widespread fires may have burned hot enough to melt the sandy soil into large glassy slabs.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
ping
Very interesting and thanks for posting! I can only imagine the heat energy that would require.
Pseudo science. It was an ancient alien nuclear war.
Did they find any shock quartz in the area?
Thanks BenLurkin.
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
It was a weaponised teleporter that teleFRAG’d everything.
/ kidding
This artifact was discovered in King Tut's Tomb. The yellow beetle was made from glass found in the Libyan Desert. Glass that resulted from a meteor strike.
No you’re not. You are definitely serious. It’s okay. I believe you...
I saw Milley sporting that on his uniform. Guy has more medals for being a fat phuc than Idi Amin.
I cannot seriously believe that anyone took seriously the idea that “a grassfire” created enough heat to melt fragments of glass out of “sand” over a wide area 75 km across. Can’t these “scientists” do elementary thermodynamics of a flame, grass, sand, and glass?
If an Air burst like Tunguska, there would be no shocked quartz in the ground. Only surface melting, it would appear.
Little Dryfas period, at 12,000 years ago plus/minus?
Sounds like the same comet strikes that wiped out the mega-fauna and burned over 4% of the Earth’s vegetation in firestorms over a 100 year period.
My Texas chili recipe came from this same region.
This may not be a coincidence.
Until Eugene Shoemaker came along, no one taught or apparently even studied anything to do with impact geology. He had his brainstorm about Meteor Crater when he studied the aftermath of early ground tests of atomic bombs. He was similarly ignored after his discovery of the impact origin of the Ries Basin in Germany. I didn't know who he was, but remember Sagan joking on TV about an Apollo-era debate between different views on lunar crater formation. Their (what seems obvious now) impact origin was finally accepted when a geologist actually explored the area around Apollo 17.
Before that, the geologist who identified the Channeled Scablands as a rapid erosional feature produced by the giving way of an ice dam as the glaciers melted was met with derision and/or crickets. That guy wasn't given his props for 30 or 40 years.
Uniformitarian gradualism is not just an approach, it's a bias.
At least, unlike Idi Amin, most amazin' man there's ever been, Milley doesn't actually eat people...
...As far as we know.
“My name is Idi Amin Dada...That’s two D’s, two A’s, and one gun!”
For those that have not read Graham Hancock you really should.
Rosie Odonuts said it was possible!..............😏
No, but they did find some nervous llamas!......... 😜
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