TASMANIA

Ancient trees and ferns long extinct elsewhere in the world still thrive in Tasmania.

    The verdant forests of Tasmania hold evidence of a rare type of devastation...

   Three-quarter of a million years ago a large meteor crashed into the southwest portion of the island. The impact was so great that, in an instant, the meteor and the rock below vaporized, fused and formed a rare type of impact glass now known as “Darwin Glass”.

   Molten rock was flung to the sky and formed twisted, flowing forms that froze in mid air and solidified before hitting ground. To this day, this glass remains where it originally fell- now buried underneath the forest floor where the stone's only contact with the world is the probing nudge of an occasional plant root.

Freshly uncovered and cleaned specimens of Darwin Glass. The color

of the glass is frequently found in a shade of near-black gothic-green

but can lighten to an olive drab and rarely to a chartreuse-green.

   These glassy fragments, born from a great destruction of the earth's surface, do not hold the bright colors of more well known green gems such as emerald, tourmaline or peridot. However, like the aforementioned gems, they have held significance as adornment and amulet by many cultures throughout the world. In fact, tektites and impact glasses may have been the first green gem utilized by man.

The central yellow-green gem scarab is a sculptured impact glass found in the

Egyptian Desert. Part of King Tutankhamun's treasure- it is over 3,000 years old.

   Known use of Darwin Glass by Tasmanian Aboriginals dates to 20,000 years before present. Small scrapers made from Darwin glass have been found in numerous Ice Age cave sites throughout the island. 

   North of Tasmania, Australian Aborigines have a tradition of using locally found tektite-glass. Different tribes used the stones for a variety of magical purposes. Some used the stones as medicinal totems to heal sickness and injury alike. Other tribes saw them as a powerful bringer-on of illness and death and hurled the stone at their enemies as a form of punishment!

   The stones found in Australia are part of a vast strewn-field thought to have been part of an extremely large meteor-strike that flung tektite glass from China downwards to Australia. Only in recent human history has it come to light that these enigmatic stones were borne out of collision with an extraterrestrial body and the earth. Where the meteor struck still remains a mystery despite the collective effort of many scientists over the past one hundred years.

   Many scientific questions, legends and stories still wait to be answered. Fascinating cultural histories throughout the world wait to be presented. The time is right to explore the little-known and ancient human connection to impact glasses and tektites and I hope you'll keep coming back to this blog to follow the extensive travels that lay ahead.

   The island of Tasmania holds the perfect locale to begin learning about the origin and formation of these unusual semi-precious stones. Join me in the next couple of weeks as I begin to present my travels in Tasmania along with plans for my first (and soon to be published) book- a combination travelogue and monograph dedicated to the Darwin Glass of Tasmania.