Meteorite impact turns silica into stishovite in a billionth of a second

Simon Redfern from the Department of Earth Sciences discusses a study that has recreated the conditions experienced during the meteor strike that formed the Barringer Crater in Arizona. The Barringer meteor crater is an iconic Arizona landmark, more than 1km wide and 170 metres deep, left behind by a massive 300,000 tonne meteorite that hit Earth 50,000 years ago with a force equivalent to a ten megaton nuclear bomb. The forces unleashed by such an impact are hard to comprehend, but a team of Stanford scientists has recreated the conditions experienced during the first billionths of a second as the meteor struck in order to reveal the effects it had on the rock underneath. The sandstone rocks of Arizona were, on that day of impact 50,000 years ago, pushed beyond their limits and momentarily - for the first few trillionths and billionths of a second - transformed into a new state. The Stanford scientists. Blasted by fragments of an asteroid that fell to Earth at tens of kilometres a second, the silica quartz crystals in the sandstone rocks would have experienced pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres, and temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. What the model reveals is that atoms form an immensely dense structure almost instantaneously as the shock wave hits at more than 7km/s.