Impact glass, impactite. Found Libyan Desert Egypt, known since Egyptian era. Exceptional individual with rare natural hole. Weighing 66.0 grams and measuring 81 mm x 44 mm x 20 mm. Libyan Desert Glass, a beautiful honey-colored impactite, was revered by the ancient Egyptians and worn by Pharaoh Tutankhamun. This beautiful piece shows several pseudo-regmaglypts and an extremely rare natural hole, likely caused by wind-born sand erosion in the desert. While not actually a meteorite, this lovely natural glass is the progeny of a large meteorite’s collision with our planet.
Small meteorites are slowed by our atmosphere and, when they land, often make shallow indentations in the ground known as impact pits. Larger meteorites may form craters, while the most massive space rocks produce gigantic impact features called astroblemes, or “star wounds.” The biggest astroblemes on Earth are millions of years old and more than one hundred miles across, making them greater in area than some countries. Those meteorite impacts generated atomic bomb-sized levels of heat and pressure that melted Earth rocks into unique materials known as impactites. The meteorites that made those giant craters have long since weathered away, but the ghostly footprints of their cataclysmic collisions with Earth remain with us to this day—as impactites.
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