[meteorite-list] Tektites

From: meteorites_at_space.com <meteorites_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:43:30 2004
Message-ID: <20010711160119.21307.cpmta_at_c000.snv.cp.net>

Actually,

Virtually every question that you raise can be addressed in a very interesting article found in METEORITE, Feb. 2001 Volume 7, No. 1. "Source of the Australasian Tektites" by Michael Pain, p. 34-37, with extensive references that if followed pretty much shatter the Lunar, or the supposed "silicate meteorite" theory.

Then there is that abstract by Billy Glass, {Microtektites and the Origin of the Australasian Tektite Strewn Field; Publications of the Center for Meteorite Studies, ASU, May 1968, p. 19) where he writes after doing a microprobe of Tunguska glass spherules sent to him by Dr. Krinov "Thus it seems probable after this preliminary investigation that some of the Tunguska material may have a composition similar to that of tektites."

As Tunguska clearly demonstrated comet impact DO NOT have to leave a crater. And being that they are composed mostly of ices (gas and water) they will not leave much solids either. (the lack of a crater might be like the old story-- the perfect murder weapon-- a blade of ice).

The dynamics of cometary impact is not known, and there are factors that are not understood. First off we are not certain how solid a comet is, and what range of structure they might have. These icy dust balls might be so fragile that even a 2 or 10 km one could not reach the surface of the earth intact, instead exploding in the air in a Tunguska type event.

This would certainly generate huge amounts of energy-- enough to blow away the atmosphere to the ground, dissociate the hydrogen-oxygen bond, and melt, if not completely vaporize source rocks.

Comets are the most likely source for the events that created tektites, and we won't have the evidence for it until it happens again, or when a sample return mission brings back a piece of a comet and the trace elements match with those found in tektites.

But more importantly, sans water, tektites in and of themselves reveal their terrestrial source as they have compositions that are identical with terrestrial source rocks. This is especially true of the microtektites.

The evidence for Lunar origin has evaporated, and the the evidence for a tektite meteoroid parent body is non-existent.

Terrestrial, impact origin is being ever the more supported by the evidence.

So-- who is it that is relying on "faith rather than reason" ????

Steve Schoner,
http://www.geocities.com/american_meteorite_survey


On Tue, 10 July 2001, Kelly Webb wrote:

>
> Hi, List,
>
> O boy, tektites again!
>
> Impact is dogma. It requires faith, not reason, for belief.
>
> First, there is no proposed impact mechanism that can create
> tektites from terrestial materials without introducing substantial
> contamination from the material of the impacting body. The "argument" or
> proof for that statement can be found in my two posts to this List of
> March 27 & 27, 2001, but since it takes 3-4 pages, I won't re-quote it
> here (check the archives). No such admixture of extraterrestial material
> exists in tektites.
>
> Back in April, a post from the Cambridge Conference Network was
> quoted to this List, and a discussion of dating tektites in
> archaeological sites ensued. What surprised me was that nobody seemed to
> take notice of a much bigger flaw in the impact argument that was
> revealed in that post.
> Here's a few quotes from the CCNet 57/2001 - 19 April 2001:
> "The Australasian event must have been much larger than previously
> supposed. This leads us back to a very basic question and that is, where
> is the 100km crater?"
> "Lee and Wei (2000) used two deep sea cores to derive an age of 793,000
> years. They also estimate a crater diameter between 90 and 116km."
> "Glass and Pizzuto (1994) estimated the diameter of the impact crater
> to be between 32 and 114 kilometres. They made no assertions about the
> impactor's characteristics. If it was a stony asteroid travelling at a
> speed of 22km/s then its diameter would be between 2 and 5 km."
>
> The notion that an impact of this magnitude could have occurred only
> 800,000 years ago without leaving detectable evidence behind is, well,
> ridiculous. So, I drug out my copy of Gehrels' Hazards Due to Comets and
> Asteroids and Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons (scaling up) and
> started listing the consequences of a 5 kilometer (90 to 110 km. crater)
> impactor:
> A) It would mass in at about 200,000,000,000 tons.
> B) The impact energy would be the equivalent of 10,000,000,000,000
> tons of TNT. (Picture a full exchange of all the nuclear weapons of all
> the nuclear powers all on one spot all at one time. Multiply by a factor
> of 2000. Apply a lot of sunblock.)
> C) The area of total devastation would be roughly large-nation-sized
> (like about the size of Mexico).
> D) The energy release would be just at the lower threshhold of a
> major mass extinction event.
> E) It would be the biggest impact since the dinosaur-killer itself.
> F) If it missed continental crust and hit the ocean (the favorite
> excuse for the absence of a crater), the resulting tsunami would have
> had a wave height of roughly 1000 meters! Excuse me, but wouldn't that
> pretty much wreck every coastline of every continent and batter inland
> for hundreds or thousands of miles everywhere on Earth? (I live 1500
> miles from the nearest fresh seafood and I'm not even 150 meters above
> sealevel and it's all downhill from here...)
> G) The other characteristic we asked to believe about this supposed
> tektite forming event is that it happened very recently and that it left
> virtually no mark.
>
> Gimme a break!
>
> If tektites were produced by large impacts, there would be a
> stochastic distribution of ejecta sizes and ejection velocities, maybe
> not Gaussian (ye olde Bell Curve), but some small portion -- 2% to 10%
> -- of the tektites would have been ejected at or above escape velocity.
> These would end up in near Earth orbits and eventually 50% to 80% of
> them would be swept back up by the Earth in 10,000 to 10,000,000 years.
> The result would be random distribution of isolated tektites of varying
> types all over the Earth with CRE dates up into the millions of years.
> Since tektites number in the millions at the very least, there would be
> enough objects in this class to have been found this way. (They should
> out-number Mars rocks by thousands to one, and they should be falling
> all the time.) Again, this situation does not seem to occur. Why not?
>
> On the other hand, the traditional notion of the tight limited
> strewn field for tektites is also suspect. While there are
> concentrations of finds, the strewn field has to be defined as the
> maximum extent between the most remote examples of a particular tektite
> variety.
> Alan Hildebrandt found two tektites in Tikal, Guatemala, with
> 800,000 years B.P. dating. Obviously, they are Australasian tektites.
> Equally obviously, they are literally halfway around the planet from the
> (presumed) Indochina crater. Therefore the strewn field of the
> Australasian tektites covers the entire planet. (Unless you think the
> Maya sailed to Australia!)
> Shaw and Wasserberg report in their 1984 paper (which is most often
> cited as the best "proof" of the impact theory) the analysis of a N.E.
> Australia oceanic tektite having the same composition and age as an
> Ivory Coast tektite, increasing the boundary of the Ivory Coast field to
> cover the entire planet also.
> Now, if somebody could only find a moldavite in Antarctica...
> Does this mean that the "strewn fields" really cover the whole
> planet? Does that argue for a lunar origin? Does it argue for a large
> impact origin? Does it mean something else altogether?
>
> There are plenty of other questions.
> Why should only a few impact events produce tektites, out of all the
> impact events of the last 40 million years? Bigger impactors? (No
> evidence.) Faster impactors? (No evidence.) Cometary impactors (No
> evidence.) One unique surface composition? (Conflicting evidence but
> another big coincidence if true.)
> Why are there no detectable characteristics of tektite associated
> craters that distinguish them from non-tektite producing craters?
> Why does it take a huge crater like Chesapeake to produce the North
> American tektites, when the rather puny Botsumtwi crater blasts tektites
> all over the Altantic and apparently all the way to Australia?
> Why are the "big four" tektite producing events associated with
> reversals in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field? (We don't even
> know why the field reverses, as far as that goes.) Another
> "coincidence"?
>
> Actually, an impactor that is already nearly a tektite in
> composition, a high silica impactor, answers some of the difficult
> questions, but nobody
> seems to believe in one, probably due to the complete absence of any
> smaller examples of this composition (no silica meteorites that we know
> of). But this smacks of an ad hoc approach, creating a hypothetical
> unique object to explain an unique unexplained event.
>
> Conversion of a true mineral (possessing crystals) into a glass
> (amorphous liquid) is probably the best way of concealing the original
> composition of any natural substance ever devised. God is tricky
> sometimes. He probably left lots of clues, but so far, I think we've
> overlooked some of them.
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
>
>
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Received on Wed 11 Jul 2001 12:01:19 PM PDT