Scattered across a swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile lie twisted chunks of black and green glass. How the glass ended up there, sprinkled along a 75-kilometer-long corridor, has been a mystery.
Now, analyses of space dust in the glass show that the glass probably formed when a comet, or its remnants, exploded over the desert 12,000 years ago, researchers report November 2 in Geology.
This corridor is the best evidence yet of a comet impact site on Earth, says Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
There are only about 190 known impact craters on Earth (SN: 12/18/18). Falling space rocks carved out
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