Abstract
THE theory of Spencer1 that tektites splashed out of terrestrial craters met with support from Cohen2, Gentner and Zähringer3 and others, but also with objections, summarized by O'Keefe4. The main objection was that the air resistance of bodies as small as tektites on their upward flight is too large to allow them to escape from the crater at the velocities (2–8 km/sec) required for their observed ranges. Vand5,6 proposed a detailed mechanism of a tektite jet formation through an implosion of a conical cavity lined with molten glass which is formed immediately after impact, and showed that a jet of tektites can survive the upward atmospheric journey if of sufficient total mass; that is, if it originated in a crater more than some 4 km in diameter. The escape is further facilitated by the low density of the hot train left after the passage of the meteorite. The high-velocity jet overtakes the general debris and keeps tektites from crystalline contamination. If moldavites are from the 24 km diameter Ries Kessel crater in Germany, the tektite jet from an initial conical cavity 4 km deep and 1 km in diameter would be a cylinder about 5 km long and 40 m in diameter, moving initially at 2.36 km/sec and carrying some 1010 kg glass with it. The original of the required cone wall implosion velocity of about 0.15 km/sec was not well understood, as such a phenomenon had not then been observed in laboratory cratering experiments, and gravity collapse could only account for part of the velocity.
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References
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Shoemaker, E. M., Impact Mechanics at Meteor Crater, Arizona, Open File Report, U.S.Atomic Energy Commission (1959). Also published in The Solar System, 4, 301 (1963).
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VAND, V. Munro Jets and the Origin of Tektites. Nature 209, 496 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1038/209496a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/209496a0
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