AUSTRALITE INVESTIGATIONS AND THEIR BEARING ON THE TEKTITE PROBLEM*

Abstract

AbstractAustralites are believed to be meteorites because their occurrence suggests a meteoritic strewn‐field and their “secondary” characteristics suggest swift passage thru the air. The australites are considered to have arrived in the Earth's atmosphere as glassy bodies that already possessed rotational shapes. If australites are meteorites, certain other kinds of tektites also are meteorites. The hypotheses of Michel, H. E. Suess, Paneth, and Stair for the origin of tektites are unconvincing in one or more respects. Tektites had probably the same origin as other meteorites, as fragments of a disrupted planet; tektites correspond to granites, as do stony meteorites to the basic mantle of the Earth. The meteorite‐planet, however, must have been an autotektic (i.e., self‐melting) system, heating up because the proportion of acidic to basic rocks was greater than that of the Earth. Its tektitic surface, containing most of the radioactive material in the planet, was molten at the time of disruption, while the stony meteoritic mantle was still crystalline. The planet may have been disrupted relatively recently.