Silica Takes on a Strange ‘Half Way’ Form in Meteorite Impacts, Experiment Suggests – ScienceAlert

What happens to materials in Earth’s crust when a meteorite slams into them? Specifically, what happens to the quartz found in many different rock types? Scientists thought they already knew the answer but new lab tests suggest we might have to think again.
In the absence of any imminent meteorite strikes, researchers used a custom contraption called a continuum gas-gun together with X-ray diffraction measurements to study what happened when quartz samples were hit by projectiles at ultra-high …

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