A common volatilization trend in Transantarctic Mountain and Australasian microtektites: Implications for their formation model and parent crater location

We studied the variations of the volatile major elements Na and K in Transantarctic Mountain microtektites and Australasian microtektites with distance from the putative source crater location in Indochina. The dataset includes 169 normal-type Australasian microtektites (101 from this study and 68 from the literature) from 24 deep-sea sediment cores up to 8000km from Indochina, and 54 Transantarctic Mountain microtektites from northern Victoria Land, 11000km due southeast of Indochina. Normal-type (MgO8000km are 4.27±0.67wt.% (n=84), 3.20±1.21wt.% (n=50), 2.10±0.25wt.% (n=35) and 1.25±0.25wt.% (n=54), respectively. The trend highlights a relationship between increasing loss of volatiles in microtektites with longer trajectories and higher temperature-time regimes which should be taken into account in microtektite formation modeling. The trend is consistent with a previous hypothesis that Transantarctic Mountain microtektites belong to the Australasian strewn field and that Indochina is the target region for the parent catastrophic impact