The Chilean desert had been a famous topic for numerous studies in the field of geology. Among the mysteries that the terrain withholds is the numerous dark, rocky glass pieces scattered across the landmass. In a new study, the secret behind the composition of the desert had been unlocked by researchers from Brown University. The paper suggests that the fragments were indeed not from our planet, but from an exploding comet that visited Earth thousands of years ago.
Puzzling Glasses in the Atacama Desert
Flowers bloom on the Atacama desert, some 600 km north of Santiago, on October 13, 2021. - In years of very heavy seasonal rains a natural phenomenon known as the Desert in Bloom occurs, making the seeds of some 200 desert plants to germinate suddenly some two months after the precipitations.
The Atacama Desert is a home for numerous studies and observatories due to the clarity of the landscape and the extremities it presents, unlike any other dessert. The wide dune stretches to over 100,000 square kilometers, making it one of the largest sand-based geological formations ever. In a recent study, it was found that 75 kilometers of the desert's total area were scratched with something, not of Earth, but of material that hailed outside the deep cosmos.
Sometime at around 12,000 years ago, the Atacama Desert was slapped with an unknown object that was so hot, it transformed many of the sands it trailed into silicate glass. With that said, the experts gathered every substantial data available from the site and examined each of the specimens in hopes to know what caused the suspicious disturbance in the Chilean desert. In the recent study, experts concluded a potential cause that would explain the intense blaze which inflicted the natural beauty of Atacama.
The investigation was a bit challenging due to the lack of informative data and specimens from the location. Good News Network reported that among the possible clues that were absent in the site were glass pieces that had shades of green.
Most of the studies that have detected the specified materials are commonly theorized to have been products of volcanic activity since the black glass shards are also emissions of volcanoes, but there were no signs that connected the pieces to volcanic properties. Therefore, the scratch on the great Atacama Desert was not induced by eruptions.
Comet Exploded Just Above the Chilean Desert 12,000 Years Ago
When examined closer, the rocky glasses from the desert contained minerals that are recurrent in cosmic bodies. Through the matching of the rocks, experts found that their compositions heavily resemble the comet fragments gathered by NASA.
With that said, the sand from the Atacama Desert was concluded to have been impacted by an explosion of a large extraterrestrial object. The authors noted that the material, most likely a comet, did not land on Earth on its full scale, but rather exploded above the surface of the planet. This caused some of its parts to propel to the Chilean desert, fusing the earthly soil with intense heat, and melting the sands into the mystic glasses we can still see up to this date.
Brown University's Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences expert Peter Schultz, who also authored the study, said in the institute's news release that this was the first-ever discovery of the concrete evidence behind the puzzling presence of the glass shards in the Atacama Desert.
Schultz believe that the comet explosion was so massive, it allowed thermal radiation and high-temperature winds to explode and affect a large part of the desert. The study was published in the journal Geology, titled "Widespread glasses generated by cometary fireballs during the late Pleistocene in the Atacama Desert, Chile."
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