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Researchers Discover Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb
Posted on Saturday, August 04, 2007 (CDT) by Thoth
 Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that researchers running simulations on the Cray supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created what could have happened 29 million years ago when an asteroid explosion turned Saharan sand into glass.
The greenish natural glass, which can still be found scattered across remote stretches of the desert, was used by an artisan in ancient Egypt to carve a scarab that decorates one of the bejeweled breastplates buried in King Tutankhamen's tomb.
"Supercomputers now allow us to approach these problems as if we were conducting actual experiments," said Mark Boslough, the physicist at Sandia whose theory about the origins of Libyan Desert Glass sparked the research.
"With this
class of computer, we can run multiple simulations at such high
resolution and fidelity that we can see phenomena that we wouldn't be
able to predict from first principles. That means we can explore
alternate possibilities as we go. It's more like doing iterative
experimental science than theoretical science."
The Cray supercomputer at
Sandia, nicknamed Red Storm, was developed jointly by Cray and Sandia,
a part of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security
Administration. Sandia upgraded Red Storm late last year to three times
its original performance level, boosting its performance to more than
100 teraflops, or 100 trillion floating point operations per second.
Red Storm is one of only three supercomputers in the world to exceed
the 100 teraflops mark, according to the TOP500 results released last
month.
"The Libyan Desert Glass
study at Sandia is truly exciting research that crosses a number of
scientific disciplines -- ranging from impact physics and geology to
Egyptology," said Jan Silverman, senior vice president, corporate
strategy and business development at Cray. "We are delighted to hear
about how our highly scalable Cray XT(TM) supercomputer architecture
allows iterative modeling techniques to find the most probable
explanation. Using the computational power of our supercomputers we
also see similar iterative techniques being used to optimize designs
from automobiles to airplanes."
Clues To a Mystery
Until recently Earth
scientists believed that natural glass can form by only two
high-temperature processes. Volcanic glass, such as obsidian, can be
produced when lava cools rapidly. Or, in rare cases, a glass known as
tektite can form from the high pressures generated when an asteroid or
comet directly impacts the earth. But compositional studies indicate
that Libyan Desert Glass does not fit either of these two categories.
Adding to the puzzle, scientists generally agree the Libyan glass was
somehow formed by a collision with an object from space, but no one has
ever been able to confirm an impact crater in the region.
Boslough found one clue to
the glass mystery in the 1994 collision between the Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter. That comet broke up into several pieces
before it made contact with Jupiter's atmosphere, where the collisions
caused fireballs that shot hundreds of miles above the planet. Boslough
conjectured that if such an air burst were to occur above Earth, it
might generate enough heat to fuse surface materials into glass.
Another clue was the
Tunguska explosion that flattened a thousand square miles of forest
across Siberia in 1908. Because there is no crater of sufficient size
to have caused this event, it is generally believed that the Tunguska
blast was the result of a meteoroid or comet fragment that exploded at
an altitude of five to 10 kilometers (three to six miles) above the
Earth's surface.
Boslough argues that a
similar atmospheric explosion could have created fireballs large enough
and hot enough to produce the Libyan Desert Glass. Such glass would
have been forged in seconds, much like the glass that formed from
super-heated sand at the Trinity site in New Mexico during the first
atom bomb test in 1945. If the asteroid blast occurred above the Earth,
there would be no evidence of a collision in the composition of the
glass and no significant crater in the ground.
Re-creating the Blast
"What I focused on in the
simulations was the explosion of the asteroid," said Boslough. "As the
object entered the atmosphere it had tremendous kinetic energy. Much of
that energy was converted to heat, creating a blast as hot as the
surface of the sun over a large area. The fireball remained in contact
with the Earth's surface for more than 20 seconds. At the same time,
winds behind the blast reached a speed of several hundred meters per
second. The glass formed from the rapid melting and quenching of the
sandstone and alluvium on the ground."
Boslough and his colleagues
at Sandia performed high-resolution hydrocode simulations on Red Storm
using the CTH shock-physics code. They postulated a 120-meter diameter
stony asteroid hitting the atmosphere at 20 kilometers per second and
breaking up, touching off a blast equivalent to a 110 megaton bomb and
producing intense heat and high-velocity winds.
According to the
simulations, this explosion would have been more than sufficient to
melt rocky material on the surface and then cool it quickly, the
conditions necessary to form natural glass. The high winds would have
accelerated the melting process by blowing away the boundary or "melt"
layer that would otherwise insulate the stone from the heat.
Boslough and his group conducted a number of simulations to come up with their results.
"Multiple iterations are
really important for gaining new insights," he said. "You can't plan
out your whole experimental matrix and lock yourself in. When we vary
the parameters, we can see new things. For example, we observed a large
ring vortex during the explosion that acts as a 'lubricant' for the
downward flow of mass and energy. No one had suggested that was
possible before."
For more information about
the Libyan Desert Glass study, go here.
Copyright: Macro*World Investor
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Re: Researchers Discover Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb
by witchwraith on Saturday, August 04, 2007 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | | global evidence of a pre-historic nuclear event are overwhelming, fused sand, vitrified stone structures and vast networks of underground shelters speak of a time countless centuries ago when mankind rose to an arrogant pinnacle of science and technology, corrupting them to thier verry core, rising up against themselves, not unlike todays world wide social and political chaos, and blew themselves BACK into the stone age, the evidence is overwhelming if one but seeks it out, this is just another anemic attempt of the "powers that be" to bury away and sugarcoat a mind numbing reality that no one wants to face, we dont learn from the past, we endevour to repeat it. |
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