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Tektites are natural glass, resulting from the fusion of the Earth's surface under the impact of an asteroid of more than one kilometer in diameter, and ejected over a long distance (between 200 and 12000 km). Four tektite fields were known until now (in North America, Australasia, Ivory Coast, Central Europe), of which only three were connected to a source crater. The most recent discoveries were made in the 1930s, and the first was described by Darwin.

The work published by the consortium led by Pierre Rochette demonstrates that the glass found in Belize are impact-produced and have the same age (805,000 years) and the same geochemical signature as glass recovered from inside a 14 km diameter crater: the Pantasma crater in Nicaragua. The demonstration of the existence of this crater had been the first step in research conducted by the same consortium in 2019. In both cases, traces of extraterrestrial chromium are found pointing to the same type of asteroid: ordinary chondrite. The study of this new crater-tektite couple will bring a better understanding of the poorly understood process of tectrite formation.

More information: "Impact glasses from Belize represent tektites from the Pleistocene Pantasma impact crater in Nicaragua" by P. Rochette et al, in press in Nature Communications Earth & Environment

This research was conducted in France by the Centre Européen de Recherche et d'Enseignement des Géosciences de l'Environnement (CEREGE, Â鶹tv/CNRS/IRD/Collège de France/ INRAE), the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (Université Grenoble Alpes/CNRS), Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Université Sorbonne Paris Cité/CNRS), Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (CEA/UVSQ/Université Paris-Saclay) and Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, planètes, environnement (Université de Lyon/ENSL/UCBL/CNRS), and internationally by the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the Globe Institute of the University of Copenhagen, the Laboratoire G-Time of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences of Curtin University, Perth.