far-out in a remote part of the Sahara Desert as a mystery scattered around in the sand a thousands of champs strange yellow green glass it is really really miss three is class we scientists are still kind of puzzled how these things for both the ancient Egyptians you this extraordinary place but for thousands of years it’s remained unexplained now the group of scientists plans to finally solve this mystery it will take them on a journey from the depths at the desert to the Cairo Museum and the test site.
Glass From The Ancient Egyptian Came From Space (Video)
https://youtu.be/g6Lbkx4zNls
the world’s first atomic bomb the and what they reveal the may pose and unsuspected threat to a song what I want to emphasize is that is hugely bigger in energy me atomic test 10,000 times more powerful and could be on I’m I home am heading for the Great Sand Sea the Egyptian Sahara Desert a team of scientists is on a mission their aim to discover why tons a most unusual glass a lying in the middle of the desert right across the street when I looked one other scientists American physicist mob boss low thinks im at last have come up with the onset it’s a scientific mystery because its unique we don’t know exactly what the process was the cause the creation of class we know it’s a natural phenomenon and therefore requires a natural explanation I maybe up a very unusual event but its certainly not a mystery that can be sold working with colleagues must learn has developed a dramatic new theory to explain how the mysterious class was produced the as a terrifying vision know what happened here now for the first time ma slow is in the desert to see the site for himself here’s hoping to find the final pieces of evidence to complete his theory I’ve been reading about this place for the last twenty years there’s only so much time you can spend sitting behind a computer looking at tables have numbers gives you a good quantitative idea but it doesn’t really give you intuition to develop that intuition.
I really think it’s important to go out on the field and and have a look joining him a geologist alley Barakat and geochemist Christian Campbell who like Barrick at is an old as a hand who spent years studying the mysterious event which must have taken place in the desert we scientists have been interested in these days of classes for a very long time because they are very different from any other natural class that we know it’s just such a mysterious class yes %uh plug back at is Egypt’s desert glass expert but I and its travel to the area several times must go to the south and go to the mall I know the area like my finger but they’re barricades interest dates back to 1998 and a remarkable discovery he was involved in 0 0 that took place in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo hidden away in a dark corner the two-income moon exhibition was a necklace native different color chance at its center was an intriguing yellow green card scanner that was said to be Cal send me a semi-precious stones the mineralogist were not socialism surrounded by armed guards and officials Barakat and his colleague mention soda me Kaylee were allowed to examine and test the journal up of and the tests revealed for the Scarab was not a semi-precious stone in fact it was made of glass of but was not a glass like any other produced by the ancient Egyptians marika at had an idea where the glass came from he knew a 10th century Arabic book with a map inside which should the location of a large mineral deposit in the Egyptian Zahara de ser and pose a map he describes him as a CNA in scenes a Morse and that it see Tuesday East answer my FF and as a payment and far out in the desert the book describes a mineral it cools para darte paradise a greenish-yellow jam the matter cat had never heard of peridot being found in this part in the desert of I am very happy because iPhones as that as this message Kansas book because he quote for the first time and zest change materials num marika guest that the Arabs have discovered the source in the class and two incomes necklace what’s more he thought he had seen some pieces the same class.
the new in the geology museum where he worked there were samples and glass brought back from this part in the Sahara by an English explorer in 1932 actually Clayton reported that far out in the desert he discovered chunks have glass scattered over thousands of square kilometres a decir he had no idea how it got there but he brought back some samples since the discovery of two incomes do several scientific teams have traveled into the Sahara to try to find answers to explain the origin this on the usual parts Barakat and his team at the latest to make the journey out to the class a review it’s a long hard journey through the knesset people take them at least three days driving and three freezing nights before they can even start looking for any class Co over the years scientists have been struggling to find an explanation for how this unusual natural glass ended up in such a huge area the Sahara hick compared to some of the other classes that we have in nature these are really interesting because the are Kylie year they have a collar and his pure silica composition that makes them really unique in the world we know no other natural classes they look like this when I have a composition like this in so we scientists are still kind of puzzled how these things for him the puzzle for the scientists is that the desert glass is not like any other natural glass found on earth most natural glasses volcanic in origin mechanic glass forms when Hawks molten magma solidifies rapidly usually when it meets cold well kinda glass is relatively common but its chemical composition and our color a quite unlike the desert plants well over the years there have been a few bizarre series trying to explain what it’s doing in the desert well one idea suggest this area was once one p and that the glass was left behind a sentiment when the Swan tryna a key aspect to this theory is that the glass form slowly at low temperatures go the Christian couple had some doubts when I first heard about this idea.
I thought well it’s an interesting one that it forms at low temperature but I wasn’t quite convinced that that there’s a class really form this way I thought well maybe there is a way if we can find out if it forms in high-temperature were reforms to the low-temperature on that Kerbal time for help to the Natural History Museum in Vienna movies work closely with in the past using their electron microscope he sex the desert glass for a mineral called zircon 0 Zack on is remarkably stable but starts to break down at high temperatures couple looked as the congress laws that have begun to disintegrate and with this tells me is that the class forum at very short time and a high temperature and to understand exactly which temperature we’re looking at here I need to analyze that different bits inside here as the zircon disintegrates it forms light and dark patches in the dark patches the zircon is broken down into a form a silica the amount is a con left in these areas shows how fathers integration has progressed and indicates the temperatures reached in the dark hair areas we have less Zarcone and more silica in with this kelso’s is that this little circle crystal has decompose partly because of the high temperature but not completely the ratio of the two elements tells me the temperature was about 1,800 degrees Celsius 1000 800 degrees Celsius is hot incredibly hard volcanic lava is only about eleven hundred degrees Celsius the whatever happened here in the desert the heat required to produce the glass was phenomenal what cable found convince him and everybody else that they had to look for another explanation there was any one thing they knew of the to create such a staggeringly high temperature the did not in the ground on and meet your right impacting with us so there’s a lot of material that falls on the earth from outer space tons and tons of this material falls on the earth every day and most of them are very small just like dust some of them up pebbles in a makeshift inks dyes in the atmosphere and sometimes a really big meaty ride hits the ground very very high speed on and no it melts the ground it vaporizes the ground and these high temperatures and pressures I enough to melt a huge quantity of rock if the molten rock formed by a meteorite impact cools rapidly it can turn into class there are for example these classes here they’re called take tights in the %ah throw away from impact by hundreds and even thousands of kilometres from the crater but these classes a very different in appearance in shape and size from but there’s a class that we have here couple is a world expert on mutual rights and even though the desert glass is so different from ordinary me to rate in class he is convinced that must’ve been for my meter right he hopes to find evidence of a massive meteorite impact in the desert they still have one more day and driving before they can even start looking for any class for any signs of what occurred there now in the heart of the Great Sand Sea.
it’s one of the most arid inhospitable places on earth no one can live here this yeah this it can be ten to twenty years between rainfalls extreme conditions even for the Sahara it’s because we’re here down we are hearing on this one here we are here and then that nothing areas all this area we comfort the and the the box office and year it’s like that we make the camp the sort of in the middle above the high concentration of the big nasa yeah whatever self get the 51 fifth the lead summer temperatures can soar to well over 50 degrees Celsius there are no roads no tracks the massive parallel San jeans stretch for hundreds of kilometres north south east the each June as a challenge and without highly skilled drivers the cars could easily overturned as I slide down the soft sand home do at last they are approaching the area where the glasses found what are the mysteries about the glass is that it scattered over an area yes because Devon the site to me looks like Mars I don’t think there’s any place on earth that’s this desolate certainly no place I’ve ever been with the glasses not sick on the ground but pieces can be found scattered between the june’s 0 I’d seen pictures in the glass before been the first time I reached down and picked up a piece and called up to the sign it was very exciting of no one knows how much classes in the gaza estimates range from hundreds to thousands of times here’s a piece a look at this there’s a nice one and another one for this is an area look down here on the ground you can actually see it if you look here you see the nice pieces flying around here there is a fee surf there’s a piece there is a peace over there most to the glass lying on the surface is small and rounded sandblasted in Polish by the sand in the wind other pieces are buried in the sand and a much larger and rough this one here is mostly pitted and doll because it has been sitting underground and only the nice smooth shiny part was exposed to the same and underground has been H bywater over hundreds or even thousands of years think E will new pieces of glass can always be found is a huge sand dunes a constantly shifting with the wind the moving at a staggering 10 meters a year the most interesting every time you come here you find different less we’re certainly grass under their care certainly class also last as the hazards move they are more classics Postmedia so it’s a very beautiful area to on 0 0 0 although there are no obvious signs a meteorite impact Barakat thinks there is some evidence not on the glass but in the rocks I’m cool on a previous trip be found an unusual little black chrome I collected by a chance funded by chance cool I was looking for glass just strange Chinese black material so it seems strange for me so I E patty talk radio and did some tests and tests in Cairo revealed the tiny shiny particles in the rock with diamonds what similar diamonds have been found elsewhere when the chair rights have landed created by the high temperatures and pressures join the impact of Barakat is now searching for more signs of an impact in the sandstone rocks in the area of a large meteorite smashing into the ground leaves behind other clues under the microscope the tiny grains of quartz which this sandstone is mostly made of unusually clear inside the American others have found some holes less some other quartz grains.
have distinctive lines caused by shock waves from an impact this seems to provide more support for a meteorite impact here and Sahara Desert but it doesn’t explain why the glasses so different from other meet you at a class of Mateen Khan degree about the significance of this evidence correctly predict I’m really interested in the distribution shocked quartz relative to the glass right seems like go the glass covers an area of o’connor just working on urs but seems like the observation I’m shocked quartz is only an inspired the why I’m not sure that we know for sure yet where to shop courses a few spots that have been surveyed so far in needs to be confirmed you find but Campbell thinks he has made a discovery which leaves no doubt as to the origin of the clients orientation I see the same for the overthrow most to the glass is completely clear but a few pieces and not up ones that show clear your right black all in one place the piece is a blast with black streaks of material inside a key to couples discovery to establish what the material trapped in a glass was made of Kerbal examined it in his lab in Vienna he analyzed it by bombarding the black to get to the glass with neutrons and after weeks of measurements found small traces as exotic element iridium here are the peaks that indicate the presence of the element iridium and this is something we would not expect to find in rocks on the surface of the earth and this is characteristic for meteorites here we have very good evidence that a meteorite really hit the earth in was incorporated with the class when it formed finding a median is good but not conclusive evidence that the meteorite impact after over a year researching couple found another rare element was me 0 the results absolutely exciting we see that the abundance love the element osmium is about 50 to 100 times higher then won’t we would ever find on the surface of the earth and more importantly the ratios of the isotopes of owes me on a very different from surface rocks the rhythm that clearly extraterrestrial and show that meteorite hit the surface of the earth and the same when but there’s a place for so we have a Eureka moment here we now know there was a meteorite impact of couple is now totally convinced the meteorite was involved in forming the clocks if but was an obvious problem within reach your ACLU where perhaps the biggest problem in the polls officers have a meteorite impact leaves behind a crater and no one has ever found any trace of a crater in the area where the glasses found for couple the lack of a crater doesn’t create a problem he has an easy on some I think what we’re looking at it’s probably a very deeply eroded structure a fresh young crater looks maybe like this and it is filled in here with broken bits of rock and melt and so on but with time all this disappears them all that we might have left is the central area here which is very difficult to detect a meteorite large enough to scorch in melt such a vast area of ground had to be big and even if the crate has been eroded there is still.
one place from where it should be possible to spotted the go through kalb as his head at the lab in Boston that interprets pictures averse taken by orbiting satellites he’s been looking at pictures from space since the 1960s back then only about 20 impact craters have been found with the advent of satellite images from space and the fact that we’re going to be recognizing all of the circular features we now have at least 200 that are proven or same a proven ever impact craters one reason there are not more known impact craters on yr is that summer so big they can only be spotted from space and the older they are the harder they are to find it is really important to look for a crater that has diet age for the formation of this class because if we say that this class is of me to write orders in which is most likely then there should be a creator of fact speech that would have formed a class so these things must come together the to help Elbaz in a search he needs to know the age when the class was food and it is possible to pinpoint the angel one technique is based on the rate at which the element you rain indicates at least tiny scratch marks on the glass which when counted gives its age this method produced a date for the desert glass it was formed nearly 30 million years ago I’ll it was an important result a good they find a thirty million euros crater I’ll is not really a problem in this part of the work to locate a twenty to thirty million year old structure because no matter what their or surf process he’s weird like you still have in the subsurface they impede above that impact for instance we have to search for here in chaired that has been dated to be order then 200 million years which means that anything that is twenty for $30 million years would certainly be how visible so el mas and his team have been searching the area looking for suitable candidates we have some creators in here tiny one in here larger creators in South appeared but nothing in dead zone that can be called an impact re so here is the great sensei in the viewers going down south work this way and this is a good class reason is right here and it is that it is too far from any have the impact craters that we have formed around so we conclude from that that we have not really found the smoking gun for the silica glass interest in visiting each wells studying the satellite images Elbaz spotted the circular formation that he thinks needs closer inspection.
for the formation is a hundred kilometers from the main concentration of class and other scientists remain doubtful did this could be the source up yet if there’s no crater then some enormously powerful cosmic event happen here nearly 30 million years ago and left little more the glass plant it’s the seemingly impossible possible which could be sold by the new theory mark moslems developing the theory starts with an observation made sixty years ago in the desert have new mexico the trinity site is where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated ok sergeant Ben Benjamin was part of the official photographic team he was just 22 I’m cameras a set up at several locations then benjamin was in a concrete bunkers six miles from the blast site and for all of them it was an awesome almost surreal experience good a 29 on the morning of july the sixteenth nineteen forty-five the bomb was exploded you where a PA system they were counting down in seconds and won a game to -10 buyers switched on all four cameras and it went off air words incredibly bright your nerve to be corny sometimes a brightness 0 noonday Sun my god it was the most amazing thing that I have ever seen in my life them I’ll never forget it no this the mushroom cloud exploded into sky with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT I’m you the week after the explosion benjamin has allowed into ground zero what he saw was startling have a car so hold power adapter device was on all-out steel tom went on to steal was absolutely very proud and a big a surprise was what had happened to the ground was cover green glass to Milford same here hola sanded melted on a top a first-up recorder interests all this green blouse with covering a home on par error and it was are correct remember ok but one could walk on it and your credit crunch clerks have been workin work on a field on maybe ice the sand was transformed into a thin layer of glass covering an area nearly 600 meters across you of could something similar have happened in the Egyptian desert but on an even bigger scale of the area where the desert glasses found this huge from here we go down mother about the 10 to 15 kilometers and we find still some loss we go up about another 30 kilometres evening we find class we’re very close to the same for free area we have the class around here is such a large area glass was formed as a result of an explosion in must’ve had the power to many thousands atomic blasts a natural explosion of that magnitude was completely unheard of no one had any idea the house such a devastating blast could have been produced the only clue came from a place called tonga SCA in the forests of Siberia in 1927 a russian scientific expedition visited tone the skin to investigate a massive explosion the explosion had actually occurred in 1998 but Douglas Kerr is so remote it was nearly twenty years before they saw the scale the devastation mom mmm they were astounded more than 80 million trees have been destroyed the scientists were possible what could have caused such an enormous explosion the first thought was that it was a meteorite but they couldn’t find a crater mmm 0 they returned to their laboratory and carried out a series have slightly altered experiments.
no one had seen anything like this before on and congressman became a scientific mystery since then scientists have had many theories but is now assumed that an extraterrestrial object somehow exploded about eight kilometers up in the atmosphere this aerial bursts clinton’s about 20 million tons of TNT and no on first perhaps a similar a real burst but even bigger happened in Egypt what happened there was hot enough to melt the ground over thousands of square kilometers this is where busloads expertise comes into the store at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico he’s developing a computer model to see if the Airbus theory can be right an event in 1994 was the turning point the impact to the comment shoemaker-levy with the planet jupiter when the comment went into orbit around jupiter in broker into the twenty fragments then one by one these fragments hurtled down into the jovian atmosphere nothing similar had ever been with us I think that the impact on jupiter was really one of the most exciting things to ever happen in the history of science Mosler specialities the physics have large Impax and for that he uses computer simulations from Oslo the shoemaker-levy comet was to be the biggest most exciting experiment imaginable this was a real opportunity to see some the we couldn’t see in a laboratory something over scale with a magnitude way beyond anything imaginable harm beyond our wildest dreams bottlers team had been developing a new theory which predicted that the impact would produce a massive fireball the No this is a sequence of snapshots from our simulations the talk image shows this incandescent fireball rising over jupiter’s horizon to be seen from Earth and in subsequent frames you see this fireball growing in kuwait but growing into this enormous phone to very high altitudes just gets huge when the fragments shoemaker-levy smashed into jupiter the pictures from the hubble telescope with just a spectacular has the simulation predicted mom when we saw the Hubble Space Telescope managers the for the first time we were so excited to see the spectacular plume rising over the horizon their predictions were very close movies are actual observation snapshots from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in the first image you see this incandescent fireball are rising over the horizon and subsequent images you see a growing into a plume and it continues to grow to this enormous size my this massive plume hot gas they predicted was ejected well over 3,000 kilometers out into space on was a spectacular explosion it was just tremendously enormous explosion on anything anybody’s ever experienced in the solar system the shoemaker-levy impact on jupiter was a pivotal moment in science inmate scientists rethink what could happen here on earth so this really was a turning point in my understanding about how impacts work I am most people thought of Impax yeah on earth does defense that create craters collisions with the solder if and typically we ignore the atmosphere we ignore atmospheric effects all the atmosphere is tremendously important and and this is the lesson we learned from mass the shoemaker-levy explosion and been observed with interest by another scientist to John Lawson one of the world’s top meteorite experts it also been puzzling about the origin.
EGyptian as a plus looking in particular and one special piece of the class it’s special because it has very distinct layers the layers consist of dance class which is almost free of bubbles and foam a class which is full of tiny little bubbles Wilson believes the layers were formed by intense heat radiating from above for an extremely hot sky and he remembered the explosion Overton gerstner the thought came to me that it required a hot sky I thought immediately of the congress K if it that’s exactly the kind of defense that I need an aerial burst but many many times larger than to Costco perhaps 1,000 times or even more times larger and the massive fireball produced on jupiter by the comet shoemaker-levy seem to offer a possible explanation I thought %ah how nice the shoemaker-levy comet seem to me to be ideal for producing an aerial burst in producing desert glass 0 and said both was in the Muslim thinking 0 good a similar a real burst happen here on earth 0 to take this idea further mas lo needed to adapt his computer model to simulate an annual explosion and for that he needed more data hmmm he wanted to see for himself how widely the class was spread in the desert 0 I think it’s helped a lot to see the distribution glass how widespread it is in some places of concentrated is another’s %uh scientific papers say the glass is scattered over 6,500 square kilometres have gas and well it’s not clear to me whether the current distribution was the actual distribution when the event occurred and the Sahara only started to become a guess at about seven thousand years ago and during the last thirty million years there have been big rivers and lakes what i think is that that the class was originally at a much smaller area tarde I am looking around now it’s just the same nothing but saying there were lakes here some time ago and there was some water and transported the class far away from the area where they originated mosley’s now confident the 30 million years ago the distribution of the glass in Egypt the smaller than now but it still needed a massive event to produce it he fed the latest data into his computer model were we motto is 120 meter diameter object entering the atmosphere 20 kilometers per second and we started off the or simulation way above where this France starts with the to explain the evidence of an actual impact found in the desert the simulation allows a fragment to the beach right to reach the ground and make a small crater but such a small impact would not produce the glance on the simulation also shows something far more powerful is happening at the same time before reaching the ground the incoming meteorite is burning up leaving a trail of incandescent material in its wake a massive column of fire which turns into a fireball the widest temperature here is the temperature over surface of the Sun and as it expands the fireball was actually attend against the surface and it’s moving very rapidly the on hurricane force so we’ve got this blast love air thats hotter than the melting temperature of the sample blowing across the sand so it’s melting the top surface in at No freezes to form a glass on I’m just like when shoemaker-levy impacted with Jupiter an enormous plume of searing gas is streaming out into space so well this material where’s creating this fireball Tehran ground level there’s also a plume that’s being formed much higher altitudes I 80 to 100 kilometers above this level and it’s being a good subject material out into space the simulation shows that even a relatively small 120 meter meteorite can create a fireball hot enough to produce the massive glass the Egyptian decimal it’s an explosion that makes the first atomic bomb Trinity look timing what I want to emphasize is that is hugely bigger in energy hugely more powerful when the atomic test trinity 10,000 times more powerful was in a Muslim now think they’ve solved the mystery of how the desert glass was formed in the Great Sand Sea 30 million years ago an asteroid was on a collision course with us heading for Egypt as it began to burn up it created a hot plume in its wake this before reaching the ground it exploded into a blistering fire no surface temperatures immediately reach 1,800 degrees Celsius the ground which is mostly sandstone melted and was transformed into a yellow green glass are above the surface a call on the superheated gas propelled itself into space the total effect was far more devastating then if it’s simply hit the ground and of the theory predicts than a real explosion is much more likely given object breaks up easily like the fragile comet shoemaker-levy so how common of Rajani’s objects in space an encounter in 1997 proved an eye-opener to the scientific community when and that spacecraft through past an asteroid coma to mathilde slower rotation showed it was not solid but was a loose assembly a rock held together by gravity they call it a flying rubble pile the we’ve discovered a number of other asteroids which have similarly low densities and this is led to are real paradigm shift where for now it’s accepted that most asteroids probably consist of rubble piles and are extremely weak from these rubble piles are liable to explode if they enter the Earth’s atmosphere the wasn’t believes that small explosions like the one over time the SCA could happen as often as once every 100 years larger ones like the one over Egypt are less frequent wilson has evidence from one other place on earth have a large a real burst this one on a truly cataclysmic scale he’s found pieces of glass throughout Southeast Asia they can be recovered from a broader region are far Thailand vietnam southern China and Cambodia the curious thing about it is no creator has been found that wasn’t believes that about 800,000 years ago a flying rubble pile broke up while still a collision course.
Trackman created its own fire and within this region certainly alva the humans would have been killed there will not be any hope for anything to survive can we protect ourselves from this happening again the suggestion in recent Hollywood films that a large asteroid heading for Earth should be blown up is possibly not the best idea knows movies your hollywood certainly got it wrong you can’t just explode an asteroid just before it hits the earth and suddenly the pieces disappear now you have a lot more smaller pieces hitting the earth and they’re all making fireballs you could actually make it much worse by attempting to exploding asteroid just before it collided with the earth blowing up the asteroid will have the unfortunate effect greatly increasing the chance that one of the pieces might explode over a built-up area the well the pro go to use small if it hit him the wrong places could be devastating per city I’m the in a city like London the devastation from even a small fire bomb extend over an area eight miles across luckily it could be millions of years before we have to deal with the large asteroid but the smaller ones will keep coming amino now from the explosion in the Egyptian desert just how devastating that can be and we also know it will happen again there are hundreds of times more the smaller asteroids there are the big winners at the astronomers track there will be another impact on the earth it’s just a matter for him that the latest from Westminster in the daily politics next on abc2 and horizon is back tonight details in just a sec moved them and them him you