moldavite; 4g – Vrábče, České Budějovice, South Bohemia, Czech Republic

 Particularly beautiful moldavite with wonderful aesthetics, surface structure and intense color.

 The formation of moldavites is explained as follows:
 The meteorite, approximately 1.5 km in diameter, entered Earth's atmosphere at about 20 km/s and formed the crater now known as the Nördlinger Ries. Immediately before impact, the Earth's surface was extremely compressed. Under high pressure and temperature, the rock melted and was ejected at several kilometers per second, some of it in a plasma state. The shallow impact angle played a role in this process. Interactions and degassing occurred within the ejected material, explaining the varying elemental compositions and characteristic shapes.[1] During its flight, the material cooled rapidly and solidified into a glassy (amorphous) state. Moldavites are therefore fragments of glass; they were transported between 250 and 450 kilometers above the dense atmospheric layers and mostly fell back to Earth in what is now the Czech Republic. (Source: Wikipedia)