Mysterious Yellow Glass in the Great Sand Sea Traced to Meteorite Impact
A rare kind of glass found in the Great Sand Sea, a desert between western Egypt and eastern Libya, has recently been traced back to a meteorite impact. The bizarre yellow glass, with its high silica content, has long been valued by collectors and was even found in a pendant in King Tut’s tomb. However, its origins have remained a mystery until now.
Geologist Elizaveta Kovaleva from the University of the Western Cape and her colleagues have determined that the glass is indeed from a meteorite impact. Their findings, published in Live Science, reveal that the glass contains minerals that only form under incredibly high pressure, such as those caused by a meteorite impact or the explosion of an atomic bomb.
However, this discovery has presented a new mystery. There is no appropriately-sized crater nearby that could be the impact site of a meteorite that could have produced the glass. This raises questions such as, “Where is the parental crater?” and “Could it have been eroded, deformed, or covered by sand?”
Kovaleva emphasizes that further investigations will be necessary to solve this mystery, likely in the form of remote sensing studies coupled with geophysics, in order to find the elusive parental crater.
The discovery of the origins of the yellow glass in the Great Sand Sea is a fascinating breakthrough, but it also opens up a new chapter in the ongoing research to understand the geological history and impact events of this desert region.