It's confirmed: The hottest rock ever discovered in Earth's crust really was super-hot.
The rock, a fist-sized piece of black glass, was discovered in 2011 and first reported in 2017, when scientists wrote in the journal
that it had been formed in temperatures reaching 4,298 degrees Fahrenheit , hotter than much of the Earth's mantle.Now, a new analysis of minerals from the same site reveals that this record-scorching heat was real. The rocks melted and reformed in a meteorite impact about 36 million years ago in what is today Labrador, Canada. The impact formed the 17-mile-wide Mistastin crater, where Michael Zanetti, then a doctoral student at Washington University St. Louis, picked up the glassy rock during a Canadian Space Agency-funded study of how to coordinate astronauts and rovers working together to explore another planet orThe chance find turned out to be an important one.
But to confirm the initial findings, researchers needed to date more than one zircon. In the new study, lead author Gavin Tolometti, a postdoctoral researcher at Western University in Canada, and colleagues analyzed four more zircons in samples from the crater. These samples came from different types of rocks in different locations, giving a more comprehensive view of how the impact heated the ground. One was from a glassy rock formed in the impact, two others from rocks that melted and resolidified, and one from a sedimentary rock that held fragments of glass formed in the impact.
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