Gunnison Crater Tektites, Colorado Options

[CP]

We have a discoverer in our midst folks! With over 2 decades of field experience in prospecting/mining across several different mineral and gem arenas including diamonds, gold, etc. We are all very lucky to not only have his personal participation and knowledge shared here, but we are also able to see first hand what new discoveries can produce!
This is a very rare treat these days in my honest opinion. My grandfather was one of the men who discovered jade in Wyoming (mid 1930's) and I wish very much I would have had known him better and his personal experiences/history of discovery times!

So lets get on with the information (there will be lots)
Johnny (Astrobleme) through many exhausting hours of work I'm sure, discovered an ancient crater formation here in Colorado around Gunnison. Now named the Gunnison crater, and has produced some very interesting tektites. Being part of Johnny's discovery I would imagine they helped prove out his crater theroy. (feel free to correct me if wrong Johnny) Tektite origin itself has been quite a discussion over years past and still is, but they are very very "dry" rocks. The pressure and heat that creates them are mind boggling!

Here is a link to the Gunnison Country Times article / news release.

Recently Johnny was looking for lapidary artists to work some tektites and we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to work some into cabochons and jewelry. We are very happy to say that we (Denise and myself) got to be the first lapidary artists to work any of these tektites.
While I was cutting the slices to use for cabochons I noticed there were some metal inclusions which Johnny later examined under magnification and...........well I'll let him tell you about the possible new information found. It's very exciting!

Here are a few pics to go along with this thread which I'm sure will be one to keep up on for the future!
These 2 pics (courtesy of Johnny) show arial views of the crater.





This is a pic of some rough pieces you all may recognize from the "what's this #28" thread.


After getting his cabochons in hand he could examine them a bit more closely and sent us these 2 pics too share with everyone.





All this hypervelocity impact discussion has my mind goin' for sure!!

More pics of the finished pieces made from these to follow.........
CP

[CP]

You are very welcome Faaus and a big thanks to Johnny for providing us with his insight and story about the discovery and proving it to the rest of the world.

For those reading along in this thread, I had promised to keep an eye out for info about pressures/temps that are generated during one of these hypervelocity events. So far I've been able to find this on megatons in tnt as to explosive events as a comparison. Still not the same study I found previously but this gives you an idea of the power involved when an impact occurs.

TNT equivalent is a method of quantifying the energy released in explosions. The tonne of TNT is used as a unit of energy, approximately equivalent to the energy released in the detonation of this amount of TNT. (kiloton=1000 tons and megaton=1,000,000 tons)

The Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, exploded with an energy of about 15 kilotons of

The 1908 Tunguska event, believed to have been caused by an impacting comet or meteoroid, is estimated to have had a force ranging from 10–15 Mt.

Based on crater formation rates determined from the Earth's closest celestial partner, the Moon, astrogeologists have determined that during the last 600 million years, the Earth has been struck by 60 objects of a diameter of five kilometers or more. The smallest of these impactors would release the equivalent of ten million megatons of TNT and leave a crater 95 kilometers across. For comparison, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons.

Back to the search for the previous article.
CP