Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway

Irishman called Pat Clayton, was crossing the lip of one such dune in December 1932 when he suddenly heard a crunching sound beneath his wheels. He got out to investigate and discovered that the desert was covered in great sheets of yellow glass. Only in the late 1990s did scientists finally confirm that the canary-yellow beetle at the heart of Tutankhamen’s necklace was carved from the very same material Pat Clayton had crunched over 500 miles away in the Great Sand Sea. The Egyptian boy king was buried in the Valley of the Gods with a precious stone plucked from the Land of the Dead. This luminous stone was not forged like diamonds, sapphires and other such gems over thousands of years of heat and pressure within the earth’s crust. Instead, it was created in the blink of an eye by a falling star. That meteor 29 million years ago had turned the sand into a kind of glass – Libyan desert glass.