So probably the strongest argument that can be advanced in favor of the meteor
hypothesis is the discovery of what's called shocked quartz that was found in a unit called the Kayenta Formation,
which is this unit right in here. Now, this is not the place where it was found, but this is the formation.
What shocked quartz is, is it's a kind of deformation in a quartz, which is a mineral,
that you can get only in places where there has been a meteor impact.
So there was a paper published
back about 10 years ago that collected
120 rock samples and made what are called thin sections
from those rock samples now a thin section is what you get when you slice a rock so thinly
that you can actually see through it, and you put it on a microscope slide and look at it under a microscope.
And so they gathered 120 thin sections and looked at them and they
found in those 120 thin sections, they found two grains of shocked quartz.
Now if you figure there were at least 50 grains per slide, there were probably more
that's two grains out of about six thousand, okay, so very very minor amounts of shocked quartz. Now
shocked quartz can only be created by meteor impacts.
So you say, "well if you find shocked quartz that must mean that a meteor hit here."  On the other hand,
this is a sedimentary deposit, which means these are rocks that were eroded from someplace else and
transported by rivers.
So when you find a grain of shocked quartz in a sedimentary deposit it means either that,
the meteor hit right near where this deposition was or a meteor hit somewhere that was later eroded and
transported by the rivers.
And it turns out that every sedimentary basin in the world has shocked quartz in it.
Because it was eroding near meteor impacts that were nearby and then transporting those grains in to where the deposition finally occurred.
So if they'd found hundreds of grains of shocked quartz in here, I would have said "well, okay.
You're looking at a meteor impact." Two grains out of 6,000?
That's a little bit less convincing, at least to me. So
there is still a debate because shocked quartz suggests that there was a meteor impact someplace.
I'm just not convinced that the meteor impact had to be here.
