Virgil Barnes, a geologist who contended that the black glassy beads called tektites, which had been regarded as extraterrestrial objects, were created from soil and rock by catastrophic cosmic collisions, some as many as 35 million years ago, has died. He was 94.
At his death, he was a senior research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology, a division of the University of Texas. He also had been an associate director of the bureau and a professor of geological sciences at the university, where he worked for 63 years.
Mr. Barnes argued that sand was fused into droplets by a tremendous burst of heat–probably from a meteoric impact–and thrown skyward. The hot molten bits were shaped by their flight into teardrops, dumbbells and spheres, hardened as they cooled and then returned to earth in cosmic showers. They range from bead-sized to fist-sized.
Some geologists have argued that tektites resemble moon rocks or the stuff of other celestial bodies, but William Fisher, a university colleague of Mr. Barnes, said that mainstream geologists now embrace Mr. Barnes’ argument that they originated on Earth.
By analyzing the rock layers in which they were found, Mr. Barnes was the first to fix the age of North American tektites at 35 million years and perhaps older, Fisher said.
In 1978, the International Mineral Association recognized Mr. Barnes by giving the name “virgilite” to a newly discovered volcanic glass he had collected in Peru, and two fossils have “barnesi” in their scientific names, honoring Mr. Barnes’ work with Cambrian rocks in central Texas.
Mr. Barnes died Jan. 28 in Seton Medical Center in Austin, where he lived.
