An impactite in the melt

Look closely, do you see wish bone shape?

It was caused by an impactite that flew from the direction of the Benavides impact structure more than 80 kilometers to the north. Map coordinates are lat 28.203226 lon –103.954120

After flying more than 80 kilometers, the quarter mile wide impactite landed into still soft, but stationary, ignimbrites. Which had been random colliding, and interflowing, from multiple directions, in a raging mega flood of flash melted melted stone only seconds before. And after landing the impactite’s  momentum kept it sliding through the still soft melt for another ten miles or more. 

This is a very important place. We see no sign of post impact thermal modification of the impactite, or the ignimbrites it landed in. And we can know that the still soft ignimbrites were stationary because its motion was across direction of flow of the ignimbrites. And there is no motion deformation of its path through the ignimbrite sheet. Almost all of the motions of these blast effected materials had stopped already when that thing hit. So this was one of the last steps in an almost inconceivably violent dance of interflowing explosive motions.

This marks a very precise moment in time. If we divide the Younger Dryas impact blast effects into two categories, thermal impact, blast effects, and post impact, thermal effects, then this marks the exact moment in time where we turn the corner. Everything that happened after this was a post impact firestorm effect. And the rest of the western half of the continent was downrange of a supersonic storm front of thermal, impact, plasma half a continent wide.

This is only a tiny corner of the impact zone. And yet the energies described by the blast effects in the little area described on this page alone, would be equal to a destructive force hundreds of times more powerful than the combined nuclear arsenals of the world.