Musolino et al., Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. , 2025
They are “little time capsules” and have been waiting all this time to be discovered in Australia. What do these mysterious “ananguitos” tell about times gone by?
New research led by geoscientist Anna Musolino, from the University of Aix-Marseille in France, observed tiny glass spheres found in southern Australia, which represent a composition resulting from impact fusion, not found anywhere else in the world.
According to researchers, these newly named “ananguitos” They were formed in a giant impact that occurred around 11 million years ago.
“These glasses are unique to Australia and recorded an ancient impact event that we were not even aware of,” says geochronologist and geochemist Fred Jourdan, from Curtin University, in Australia, to
“They were formed when an asteroid collided with Earth, melting surface rocks and spreading debris thousands of kilometers away. These tiny pieces of glass are like little time capsules from the depths of our planet’s history.“he explains.
“What makes the discovery even more intriguing is that, although the impact must have been immense, scientists have still not been able to locate the crater,” he further states.
The composition of these ananguitas strongly indicates that they were formed in an impact that took place in a different part of the Earth’s crust compared to the Australasian dispersal impact.
the authors of the published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters this month they state that “the systematic geochemical and petrographic differences between the western and eastern ananguitas, which still need to be confirmed with additional samples, may help to narrow down the location of the impact.”
“However, also it is possible that the crater has been buried for the last 11 million years“, they argue.
