One day, likely in the 2nd century B.C., someone meandering through the dunes spotted a glint of light and bent down to pick up a particularly luminous piece of glass, the color of sun shining through a yellow-green leaf. Meteorite-made desert glass, known as Libyan Desert GlassĪll the while, the desert glass sat unhurried in the shifting sands. The last time you took a breath, two nations decided to draw a straight line through the sands. About 15 seconds ago, colossal stone pyramids started to sprout along a riverbank, near the Egyptian desert. During that quarter-hour, the Sahara has oscillated back and forth between wet and dry every minute. Proportionately, if one day has passed since the meteor impact, modern humans have been around for only 15 minutes. Ice ages came and went, mind-boggling arrays of species evolved and went extinct, and human beings were born. In the next 28.5 million years, the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa and formed the Red Sea. When the shock waves subsided and the smoldering landscape cooled, the molten sand solidified into countless little chunks of clean, vibrant yellow-green glass, left strewn across a vast stretch of harsh land. When this meteorite smashed into the earth, its immense heat and pressure turned the landscape into a scorching oven, instantly liquifying the silica sands. If you were a creature walking in the sands south of Egypt’s tropical forests, you might have looked up into the sky to see a bright light coming towards you, fast. The world’s first cats have just come into being, and much of Europe is underwater.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |