Tektites That Were Partially Plastic after Completion of Surface Sculpturing

Among the 50,000 tektites collected over an 8-year period as part of a representative collection of the indochinities in an area near Dalat, South Vietnam, several individual ones have been found that show evidence of having been internally plastic after surface sculpturing was essentially completed. Two drops, which were bent after having formed a thin exterior skin or crust, exhibit surface breaks and stretching of their plastic interiors within the breaks. The lack of deep sculpturing in this interior stretched area, coupled with twisting within the break on one of them, indicates that the surface features on these tektites were formed in the atmosphere and not by etching by soil acids, as had been widely believed.