Tektites Presentation?

Question

I am doing a presentation on tektites. I heard that some people might have different opinions about them. I know what they are but what's your opinion or facts babout them that you know?

Answer 1

Tektites are ejecta thrown out from impacts of asteroids and comets with the Earth. They fell upon the land or oceans from above over huge areas of the planet, and all tektites are made mostly of silica, the rest being various kinds of metal oxides. Some specimens have been found that are nearly pure silica, or quartz. What is known beyond any doubt is they formed molten, that they flew though the atmosphere at speeds up to 7 miles per second and that they're utterly dry. The impacts that created them hurled them into space as white hot blobs of melted rock, and once in space all of their water and other volatiles boiled away before they fell back down to the ground as vast strewn fields of tektites. They couldn't have been in space for very long because unlike meteorites which are full of cosmic ray tracks, tektites have no signs of cosmic ray tracks. When a cosmic ray hits matter, it leaves a track as it slashes into it, and the more tracks, the longer the meteorite was adrift in space before falling to Earth. The absence of cosmic ray tracks is because they were in space for at matter of minutes or hours at most, not tens of millions of years or longer meteorites spend in space. Also, the ratios of isotopes in tektites matches those in terrestrial rocks. Tektite is a term taken from the Greek word tektos, which means molten. Experiments in laboratories show that aerodynamic forces are why tektites have the sometimes bizarre shapes such as dumbbells and flanges. Although many are black, they can also be green, yellow and a whole range of other colors. They're quite beautiful but they also testify to the violent impacts the Earth is always at risk from at any given moment.