Abstract
We report the chemical composition of 176 glass spherules obtained from Antarctica blue ice and deep-sea sediments from the Central Indian Ocean Basin. This study compares the chemistry of glass spherules collected from various reservoirs, thereby allowing us to look into possible bias and efficiency of different collection techniques. Glass spherules have experienced extreme heating among the S-type cosmic spherules, and have suffered significant ablative elemental loss for which their precursors remain ambiguous. The previous model calculation for the glass spherules indicates chemical changes due to atmospheric entry. In addition, the earlier heating experiment results for the glass spherules show some insight into their formation processes. We report Ca–Al glass spherules that have high CaO+Al2O3 >9 wt% indicating larger particles with excessive evaporation of moderately volatiles (Fe, Si, Mg) resulting in refractory (Ca, Al) enriched glass or equilibration of minor Ca and Al phases in glass. Glass spherules from Antarctica and deep-sea are morphologically distinct and happen to have ablated most of their elemental Fe during atmospheric entry, however despite it, their bulk chemical composition and atomic ratios indicate to have a broad correspondence with carbonaceous chondrites, thereby, preserving the precursor properties.
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Acknowledgements
This research work is supported by the GEOSINKS, MOES-PMN, MOES-NCPOR, and the PLANEX project. We gratefully acknowledge the UGC-CSIR for their financial support. We thank Vijay Khedekar and Areef Sardar for providing technical support. We also thank the anonymous reviewers, for their comments and suggestions that have improved the quality of the manuscript. This is NIO’s contribution no. 6672.
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D Fernandes has carried out the main objective behind the manuscript, apart from sample collection, writing, and analysis. N G Rudraswami has supported for project funding, manuscript writing along with sample collection. M Pandey and M Kotha have supported during writing and reviewing the manuscript.
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Communicated by N V Chalapathi Rao
Supplementary material pertaining to this article is available on the Journal of Earth System Science website (http://www.ias.ac.in/Journals/Journal_of_Earth_System_Science).
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Fernandes, D., Rudraswami, N.G., Pandey, M. et al. Glass spherules from Antarctica blue ice and deep-sea sediment of the Central Indian Ocean Basin. J Earth Syst Sci 130, 100 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-021-01590-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-021-01590-6