virtually uninhabited area of the ‘Great Sand Sea’ near the Saad Plateau in Libya, just north of
the south western corner of Egypt when he was startled by the sound of his tyres crunching loudly
on something in the sand. When he alighted from his vehicle to investigate the sound it turned out
that he was driving on what appeared to be large pieces of the most beautifully clear, yellowy-
greenish glass.
It was soon discovered that this stuff wasn't just any ordinary old yellow glass either, but that it
was in fact, an ultra-pure type of glass consisting of a staggering, 98 per cent pure silica. It has
also been realised that Clayton wasn't the first person to come across this field of glass and that
various 'prehistoric' hunters and nomads had obviously also found the now-famous Libyan Desert
Glass (LDG) before him. The same glass had been used to make knives, various sharp-edged
tools and other objects that had been found in the past. It has been reported that a carved scarab of
LDG was even found in Tutankhamen's tomb (fig 147), which clearly indicates that the glass was
also sometimes used for jewellery and had obviously been there for an extremely long time. The
Glass had in fact often been seen before through its use in some artefacts but the actual location
of source had been hitherto unknown until discovered by Clayton in 1932.
An article by Giles Wright that appeared in the British science magazine New Scientist (July
10, 1999) entitled "The Riddle of the Sands", states that LDG (fig.148) is the purest natural silica
glass ever found and that there is easily in excess of a thousand tonnes of this ultra pure glass
lying strewn across hundreds of square kilometres of bleak uninhabited desert in Libya. Some of
the chunks have been reported to weigh as large as 26 kilograms, but most LDG is found in
smaller, angular pieces looking more like weathered glass shards from a gigantic broken yellow
bottle. So where on earth did all this stuff just come from? How in the world did it get there?
According to the article, LDG, pure as it is, does contain some defects: tiny bubbles, white
wisps and inky black swirls. The whitish streaks consist of refractory minerals such as cristobalite
but the black ink-like swirls are mainly iridium, an extraterrestrial element that is commonly
associated with some type of an impact such as a meteorite or comet.
The generally accepted theory is that the glass was most likely created by the searing, sand-
melting impact of some kind of a cosmic projectile though no-one is quite sure what.
Fig.147 Fig.148
But again, there are some serious problems with this theory. For example: Where did such an
immense amount of glass shards come from? And how did they get so widely dispersed? There is
also the perplexing fact that there is no evidence of any kind of any impact crater whatsoever
anywhere in the vicinity, either on the surface of the desert or detected by microwave probes that
have been made beneath the ground by ground penetrating satellite radar.
Furthermore, LDG is incredibly free of impurities, in fact far more so than any other known
type of glass and actually appears to be much too pure to have really been the result of something
as destructive as a meteor or comet collision, both of which are very catastrophic and extremely