Rochette, Pierre;
Beck, Pierre;
Bizzarro, Martin;
Braucher, Regis;
Cornec, Jean;
Debaille, Vinciane;
Devouard, Bertrand;
... Reynard, Bruno; + view all
(2021)
Impact glasses from Belize represent tektites from the Pleistocene Pantasma impact crater in Nicaragua.
Communications Earth & Environment
, 2
, Article 94. 10.1038/s43247-021-00155-1.
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Abstract
Tektites are terrestrial impact-generated glasses that are ejected long distance (up to 11,000 km), share unique characteristics and have a poorly understood formation process. Only four tektite strewn-fields are known, and three of them are sourced from known impact craters. Here we show that the recently discovered Pantasma impact crater (14 km diameter) in Nicaragua is the source of an impact glass strewn-field documented in Belize 530 km away. Their cogenesis is documented by coincidental ages, at 804 ± 9 ka, as well as consistent elemental compositions and isotopic ratios. The Belize impact glass share many characteristics with known tektites but also present several peculiar features. We propose that these glasses represent a previously unrecognized tektite strewn-field. These discoveries shed new light on the tektite formation process, which may be more common than previously claimed, as most known Pleistocene >10 km diameter cratering events have generated tektites.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Impact glasses from Belize represent tektites from the Pleistocene Pantasma impact crater in Nicaragua |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s43247-021-00155-1 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00155-1 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206770 |
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