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The John Batchelor Show

1/2: #Bestof2021: The glass-strewn Atacama Desert twelve millennia after a comet bolide. Peter Schultz, @BrownUniversity, @BrownAlumniMag. David Livingston, SpaceShow.com (Originally posted November 16,, 2021)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

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🗓️ 23 May 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

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1/2: #Bestof2021: The glass-strewn Atacama Desert twelve millennia after a comet bolide. Peter Schultz, @BrownUniversity, @BrownAlumniMag. David Livingston, SpaceShow.com (Originally posted November 16,, 2021)

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/comet-exploded-over-atacama-desert-revealed-by-glass

https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/50/2/205/609354/Widespread-glasses-generated-by-cometary-fireballs

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:23.0

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0:26.0

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0:56.0

VolitionRx, web address, brown University's department of Earth, environmental and planetary scientists. The professor assures me there is very likely the good likelihood that human beings have settled in this area 12,000 years before right now, along with other megafauna.

1:12.0

And then one day, professor of very good evening to you, your presentation is as exciting as the passing of the dinosaurs. What is it that you're presenting in geology magazine that is very likely to have been an event that left very few signs except yours 12,000 years ago and this moment in Chile, good evening to you professor.

1:36.0

Good evening, nice to be here. And the event, can you describe that moment professor, what's your thing happened?

1:44.0

Well, we think somewhere between 11,500 years ago and 12,300 years ago there was one of these events that was just striking. There were fireball that came from the sky and exploded and in the process of doing that, it literally fused.

2:04.0

It melted the soils and turned them into these slabs of glass. But it wasn't just that. The other thing that happened is that there was a massive wind associated with the object coming down.

2:17.0

And this wind literally picked up the glasses that had formed, rolled them around, sheared, rolled them on the ground like a snowball, where picked up other material, other soils, even some plant material, trapped them inside.

2:33.0

And this happened in about four or five different places along a 75 kilometer corridor along the Atticomad Desert. It's in the Atticomad Desert, but it's on the lower desert. It's still very, very dry. But not at that time, at that time it may have been very different with trees and trees and plants. But this would have been something that would have been, let's just say, a barbecue.

3:01.0

A barbecue, David. How do you know it was a comet and not an asteroid and was it an air burst or did it actually hit the ground?

3:10.0

It never hit the ground. It wasn't air burst. And we know this because we've looked everywhere for the critter. We cannot find any evidence of it. And the way it's distributed in these different areas, we know that they were concentrated.

3:25.0

And in addition, we know that the temperatures were so high that actually fused and melted zircon. Where did you get zircon that dissociated into different components?

3:39.0

It was a code of machined and so it could go like that. So we know it was extremely hot. Now, how do we know it was a comet?

3:46.0

Well, my, the keen eye of my associate, Scott Harris from Fernbank Science Center, he was looking at this with a standing electron microscope and noticed that there was frames, minerals, not just a single mineral, but assemblages of minerals.

4:00.0

And these were very unusual. They somehow they survived that I can tell you how. But somehow they survived. And these minerals have a composition that indicates they came from a very primitive body, something called as C.I. Conrad.

4:15.0

But then with further examination and from some future publications that came out along the way, it turns out that the most likely candidate was a comet. And while we would know this is because Stardust brought back material from a comet, this comet, this spacecraft brought back cometary debris from the,

4:37.0

little bits of debris from this comet, in the start, NASA, in the start, us mission. In the cough, the stuff in the air gel, and there have been an examining ever since. Well, it turns out this stuff was very similar to that. In addition, there have been some experiments done and they indicate that the other way could form would be from the comet.

4:57.0

Having said that, I need to make a distinction. There are live comets and they're dead comets. The live comets of the ones we see with a big tail coming to the sky. Dead comets are basically cometary bodies mass creating as asteroids.

5:11.0

But they become very soft, very spongy, too well, a little pile. And so it's possible. This was one of those dead comets. But my money, the way we think this may have to come in, that my money is that this was something that broke up. There is someone to stream a Calivi when it's climbed into Jupiter, that this may have been one of those types of events.

5:36.0

We're looking at the high desert of northern Chile. And we need to describe what this terrain looks like because if this happened 12,000 years ago, people have been looking at this area for a long time puzzling what they're seeing on the ground. The photographs that are provided by Brown University help a little bit. It looks like a wasteland, not unlike another planet. Say the planet Mars. We see pictures all the time that have droons, small pieces. And now on Mars,

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