For Howard Carter and/or Lovecraft fans...
King Tut's necklace shaped by fireball
June 26, 2006
LONDON: Scientists believe they have solved the mystery surrounding a piece of rare natural glass at the centre of an elaborate necklace found among the treasures of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh.
They think a fragile meteorite broke up as it entered the atmosphere, producing a fireball with temperatures over 1800C that turned the desert sand and rock into molten lava that became glass when it cooled.
Experts have puzzled over the origin of the yellow-green glass -- carved into the shape of a scarab beetle -- since it was excavated in 1922 from the tomb of the teenage king, who died about 1323BC.
It is generally agreed the glass came from an area called the Great Sand Sea, but there has been uncertainty over how it was formed because there is no crater to back up the idea of a meteorite. Now it is thought the meteorite responsible was not intact but made up of loose rubble.
"A fireball moving quicker than a hurricane force would have meant a blast of air so hot it could melt all the sand and sandstone on the ground," said Mark Boslough, an expert on impact physics based at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
He recreated the effect on his computer and found that an object 120m in diameter and travelling at 20km a second would produce enough heat to melt sand and create glass without leaving a crater as it broke up in the atmosphere.
"It would have become a molten lake of bubbling liquid sand, and as the sand cooled it would have formed glass, which ended up in King Tutankhamun's jewellery," said Dr Boslough. The necklace with the 2.5cm oval glass is housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The object was one of hundreds of items discovered by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. In his diary, he described the brightly coloured gem as "greenish yellow chalcedony". But in 1999, geologists tested the composition of the scarab and concluded it was not chalcedony but natural desert glass, which is found only in the Great Sand Sea 800km southwest of Cairo.
Many meteorite craters can be seen only from space, so satellite photography experts examined the area. Farouk El-Baz, from Boston University, said: "If this glass is of meteoric origin, there should be a crater of that age.
"But we did not find a smoking gun for silica (glass) there," Dr El-Baz said.
The Sunday Times
King Tut's necklace shaped by fireball
June 26, 2006
LONDON: Scientists believe they have solved the mystery surrounding a piece of rare natural glass at the centre of an elaborate necklace found among the treasures of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh.
They think a fragile meteorite broke up as it entered the atmosphere, producing a fireball with temperatures over 1800C that turned the desert sand and rock into molten lava that became glass when it cooled.
Experts have puzzled over the origin of the yellow-green glass -- carved into the shape of a scarab beetle -- since it was excavated in 1922 from the tomb of the teenage king, who died about 1323BC.
It is generally agreed the glass came from an area called the Great Sand Sea, but there has been uncertainty over how it was formed because there is no crater to back up the idea of a meteorite. Now it is thought the meteorite responsible was not intact but made up of loose rubble.
"A fireball moving quicker than a hurricane force would have meant a blast of air so hot it could melt all the sand and sandstone on the ground," said Mark Boslough, an expert on impact physics based at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
He recreated the effect on his computer and found that an object 120m in diameter and travelling at 20km a second would produce enough heat to melt sand and create glass without leaving a crater as it broke up in the atmosphere.
"It would have become a molten lake of bubbling liquid sand, and as the sand cooled it would have formed glass, which ended up in King Tutankhamun's jewellery," said Dr Boslough. The necklace with the 2.5cm oval glass is housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The object was one of hundreds of items discovered by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. In his diary, he described the brightly coloured gem as "greenish yellow chalcedony". But in 1999, geologists tested the composition of the scarab and concluded it was not chalcedony but natural desert glass, which is found only in the Great Sand Sea 800km southwest of Cairo.
Many meteorite craters can be seen only from space, so satellite photography experts examined the area. Farouk El-Baz, from Boston University, said: "If this glass is of meteoric origin, there should be a crater of that age.
"But we did not find a smoking gun for silica (glass) there," Dr El-Baz said.
The Sunday Times
