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The material collected was found on Walnumfjellet, a peak in the Sør Rondane mountain range on the coast of Antarctica, about 4,000 km south of South Africa. This range of peaks reaches roughly 3,000 meters high, and the summits ice-free. Dating techniques show that the area the material came from has been exposed for at least 870,000 years.
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Spherules about the width of a human hair found on a mountain in Antarctica tell a story of a large impact from a 100-meter wide asteroid some 430,000 years ago. Credit: Scott Peterson / micro-meteorites.com
The debris pieces found are called
impactites, minerals made upon impact. They re spherules some 100 to 300 microns wide (a human hair is about 100 microns in diameter, or about a tenth of a millimeter). When I first saw them I thought they resembled tektites, dark glassy material blasted off the ground in a big impact. The huge energy and heat released upon impact melt soil into glass, which gets thrown into the air, cools, and