Flickering flames over the Libyan Desert?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Libyan Desert Glass (LDG), rediscovered in modern times in 1932, is an ultrahigh-temperature glass composed of nearly pure SiO2. LDG is found as surface float in Egypt’s Libyan (Western) Desert, its strewnfield defined by the intersection of major faults. Extra-terrestrial components are present in LDG but there is no associated impact crater. LDG is not an impactite, nor do pieces exhibit aerodynamic forms. Extremely viscous silica remained hot long enough to flow several centimetres. Additional constraints on the origin of LDG are imposed by exotic materials found nearby: a dark 30-gram granular micro-diamond mass, mullite-magnetite-silica glass rocks with micro-diamonds, lumps of fine-grained magnetite, titanium filaments, titanium nitride, titanium aluminide, aluminium oxycarbonitride, phosphides, silver, zirconium, zinc, carbonaceous grains, and metal grains coated with carbonaceous materials. The region is underlain by 500–3000 m of flat-lying sandstone composed of quartz grains and little else. To account for LDG and the other unusual materials and nearby outgassing vents, serpentinization is evoked. Products of this complex low-temperature crustal process include serpentine, magnetite, aqueous silica, and great quantities of hydrogen. The hydrogen, produced in Basement rocks beneath the sandstones, may have risen along faults, passing around grains of quartz (with which it does not react) until slowed by tight conditions, perhaps self-sealed by silica produced during serpentinization. Columns of quartz hundreds or thousands of metres high with intergranular spaces filled with H2 (±CH4) may have been established with some hydrogen leaking into the surface domain while still more was produced at depth. Disturbance by occasional impacts or airbursts, large or small, would violently release great columns of pressurized hydrogen, which, ignited, would burn until exhaustion. Such sustained heating events could be repeated. Exotic products might come from materials formed cold in the outer solar system, transformed in a great flickering flame with temperatures perhaps exceeding 1800°C.