[meteorite-list] Known Tektite Strewn Fields?

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:56:11 -0500
Message-ID: <23134A3EEFCE47689421D65278F9EDD1_at_ATARIENGINE2>

Hi, Anita, List,

In case you missed the references I gave
on Moldavites:
http://www.geology.cz/bulletin/contents/2002/vol77no4/04trnkafinal.pdf

And this:
http://www.geology.cz/bulletin/contents/2002/vol77no4/05artemievafinal.pdf

http://www.geology.cz/
and browse for publications (they're mostly in English).

Of course, maybe you weren't looking for Moldavites.

I know of no one source that covers the Australiasian
strewnfield exhaustively. And Ivorite data on their
find locations seems virtually impossible to find.

Both Georgia and Texas yield tektites to the surface
exclusively because of exposures of strata of the right
age and the streams to wash them out. The Bediasite
strewnfield is 140 miles long and about five miles wide.
It's not a "strewn" field; it's an erosional feature.

For some reason hunters seem to think all the tektites
from this impact went south and west, forgetting entirely
the Martha's Vineyard tektite. It was found in a wash or
gulley (pick your technical term) in the cliffs on the south
side of the island and was about to be pushed into the
Atlantic Ocean when discovered.

No reason it was deposited there 34 million years ago.
There hasn't always been an island there. Could just as
easily have been deposited in upper New York state or
Michigan or Canada and been scraped off the terrain
by yesterday's glaciers and pushed to the Vineyard.

I suspect that the eastern 2/3rd of the U.S. is the
"strewnfield" for the oldest tektite-producing impact,
and anywhere you can find an Eocene Terminal surface
laid bare or cut and eroded, you could find a tektite.

Oddly, I discover that Geologists call the beginning of
the Eocene (at 55.8 million years ago) the Terminal
Event (dumb usage). Isn't "terminal" when it "terminates"?
And just now I found another paper that calls the Eocene-
Ogilocene boundary the Eocene Terminal Event. You
guys need to get your ends straight.

At any rate, I mean the boundary at the top of the
Eocene strata and the bottom of the Ogilocene,
34 million years ago.

So, I have a question for the geologists on the List
(I know you're there), where do I go in the Eastern U.S.
to find Top-O-The-Eocene exposures (beside Georgia
and Texas)?

Look at the problem this way: 34 million years ago,
at the end of an era, some joker hired crews of minimum-
wage teenagers to scatter all my golf balls equitably across
the landscape. They walked the entire Eastern U.S. in
a long row, spaced hundreds of feet apart, and every
few hundred feet, they dropped one of my golf balls.

Now, 34 million years has passed, and what I want to
know is: "Where's my golfballs?"

What's the best spot to look?


Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anita Westlake" <anitawestlake at att.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 1:36 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Known Tektite Strewn Fields?


Dear List:
Could someone lead me to an online resource for known TEKTITE
strewnfields?
Thanks a bunch,
Anita

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Received on Tue 31 Aug 2010 07:56:11 PM PDT