King Tut's gem may have formed from meteor collision

[henry]

This article is very interesting when we realize that the time of Tut's reign was just after the major catastrophe tied to the explosion of Thera. If we consider that this period was the most recent of the 3600 year cycles of cometary intervention on our planet, evidence of a meteor collision is important.

Henry

King Tut's gem may have formed from meteor collision

Updated Fri. Jul. 21 2006 1:20 PM ET

Kimberly Fu , DiscoveryChannel.ca

Cosmic forces may have formed a rare glass gem belonging to King Tutankhamen of ancient Egypt, scientists say.

Researchers from the Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority say the glass has a silica content of 98 per cent, making it the purest in the world.

The researchers claim such glass could only be found in the Eastern Sahara desert.

The researchers say the glass was formed at a temperature that approached that of the surface of the sun, suggesting a meteorite might have created the glass.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico believe that the glass was made from a natural airburst.

A colossal instance of such a burst happened when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter and exploded into its atmosphere, creating the largest incandescent fireball ever witnessed.

The New Mexico researchers created a simulation much like the 1994 Jupiter collision to learn more about what happens during such an event.

The results showed an impact that could have created a fireball hot enough to generate ground temperatures of 1,800 Celsius, and possibly leave behind a field of glass.

According to the researchers, airborne explosions happen roughly once every 100 years.

They say another such event is likely to happen in the near future.

http://reports.discoverychannel.ca/...ery_tut_fireball/20060721?hub=DiscoveryReport

 

[Rick]

The BBC had an article on this, but it mentions that "it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation."
Coincidentally, the day before this article came out I read a piece on the mysterious glass in the Sahara desert. It suggested the existence of this glass may have been due to an ancient atomic nuclear explosion. It also discusses vitrified forts in Scotland, France, Turkey and the Middle East, in which ancient massive stone forts mysteriously had their stone walls partially fused by intense heat. Were all these sites dealt a "glancing blow" by comets? It seems unlikely. The BBC article uses the Tunguska event as an example of a comet that exploded before hitting the ground, yet the heat given off by this explosion that is supposed to melt glass wasn't even hot enough to vaporize the trees, but merely flattened them.
The Nexus Magazine article mentions the ancient Indian text of Mahabharata which, the author says, describes ancient atomic warfare between Atlantis and the Rama Empire. Is anybody here familiar with Mahabharata?

The Evidence for Ancient Atomic Warfare
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/ancatomicwar1.html

Tut's gem hints at space impact
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5196362.stm

n 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces.

The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.

Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.

But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?

Thursday's BBC Horizon programme reports an extraordinary new theory linking Tutankhamun's gem with a meteor.

Sky of fire

An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images.

American geophysicist John Wasson is another scientist interested in the origins of the glass. He suggested a solution that came directly from the forests of Siberia.

"When the thought came to me that it required a hot sky, I thought immediately of the Tunguska event," he tells Horizon.

In 1908, a massive explosion flattened 80 million trees in Tunguska, Siberia.

Although there was no sign of a meteorite impact, scientists now think an extraterrestrial object of some kind must have exploded above Tunguska. Wasson wondered if a similar aerial burst could have produced enough heat to turn the ground to glass in the Egyptian desert.

Jupiter clue

The first atomic bomb detonation, at the Trinity site in New Mexico in 1945, created a thin layer of glass on the sand. But the area of glass in the Egyptian desert is vastly bigger.

Whatever happened in Egypt must have been much more powerful than an atomic bomb.


Dr Mark Boslough, Great Sand Sea (BBC)
Boslough's specialism is modelling large impacts

Impact simulation
A natural airburst of that magnitude was unheard of until, in 1994, scientists watched as comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter. It exploded in the Jovian atmosphere, and the Hubble telescope recorded the largest incandescent fireball ever witnessed rising over Jupiter's horizon.

Mark Boslough, who specialises in modelling large impacts on supercomputers, created a simulation of a similar impact on Earth.

The simulation revealed that an impactor could indeed generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1,800C, and leaving behind a field of glass.

"What I want to emphasise is that it is hugely bigger in energy than the atomic tests," says Boslough. "Ten thousand times more powerful."

Defence lessons

The more fragile the incoming object, the more likely these airborne explosions are to happen.

In Southeast Asia, John Wasson has unearthed the remains of an event 800,000 years ago that was even more powerful and damaging than the one in the Egyptian desert; one which produced multiple fireballs and left glass over three hundred thousand square miles, with no sign of a crater.

"Within this region, certainly all of the humans would have been killed. There would be no hope for anything to survive," he says.

Dr Aly Barakat with desert glass in hand (TV6/BBC)
Barakat holds up one of the many, huge chunks of glass in the desert
According to Boslough and Wasson, events similar to Tunguska could happen as frequently as every 100 years, and the effect of even a small airburst would be comparable to many Hiroshima bombs.

Attempting to blow up an incoming asteroid, Hollywood style, could well make things worse by increasing the number of devastating airbursts.

"There are hundreds of times more of these smaller asteroids than there are the big ones the astronomers track," says Mark Boslough. "There will be another impact on the earth. It's just a matter of when."
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[paulnotbilly]

It's here for the Mahabharata and also funny glass from the desert:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=2370