Strange glass scattered across southern Australia might be the calling card of an asteroid impact so massive that it melted the Earth’s surface and hurled debris for hundreds of miles. The problem is, scientists still haven’t found the crater.
The glassy fragments, known as tektites, are natural materials forged when a meteorite slams into Earth with enough force to liquefy rock. Most tektites can be traced back to one of five known splash zones, including a colossal strike 800,000 years ago that spread debris across Australia and Southeast Asia. But researchers studying a set of unusual Australian samples say they tell a different story.
“These glasses are unique to Australia and have recorded an ancient impact event we did not even know about,” said Fred Jourdan, a geochemist at Curtin University, in a press release.
This Strange Australian Glass Might Be From a Huge Asteroid, but the Crater’s Missing
The new study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, examined thousands of tektites stored in the South Australian Museum. From that haul, researchers zeroed in on 417 oddballs that didn’t match the usual chemical profile.
Further tests in France confirmed that six of them shared an identical composition with anomalous samples studied decades ago. These findings suggest a separate impact that likely occurred about 11 million years ago.
“These tiny pieces of glass are like little time capsules from deep in our planet’s history,” Jourdan explained.
The team gave the unusual tektites a new name: ananguites, a nod to the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people who call themselves Anangu, meaning “human being.”
What makes the discovery stranger is the missing crater. A strike large enough to create this much glass should have gouged a scar somewhere on the planet. So far, scientists suspect possible sites in places like Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, or the Philippines. In volcanically active areas, an impact crater could have been mistaken for volcanic terrain or erased entirely by geological activity.
Jourdan said the discovery raises bigger questions about how often Earth has been rocked by massive asteroids. If tektite-producing events have been overlooked in the past, similar impacts may have happened more frequently than anyone realized.
“Understanding when and how often large asteroids have struck Earth also helps us assess the risk of future impacts, which is important for planetary defense,” Jourdan said.
For now, the shards of ancient glass sit as breadcrumbs from a disaster hiding in plain sight. The crater is still out there.
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