David gives a good lecture here [www.youtube.com] where he discusses how he acquired some of his collection of the glass, and the chemical analyses of the glass and the materials deposited within it.

It is around the 29 minute mark where he presents the chemical analysis of the fragments of "impact diamond" within the glass.

They used a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which measures the rotational and vibrational modes of molecules to identify the structural fingerprint of the material, and found a raman shift peak at 1332 per cm (or reciprocal cm, or cm^-1 however you want to say it). This is the same raman shift as the diamond crystal structure (see here [grahamhancock.com] which is a screen grab from David's Youtube lecture).

Now the issue I have with this graph is that there is no scale on the vertical axis, so one cannot know whether the scale is linear or logarithmic, which will affect the percieved width of the peak, and so could impact the next part of the analysis.

Natural forming diamond (i.e. the diamond that forms within the earth under large pressure and temperature over a long period of time), has typical Full Width Half Max values of around 1-3 per cm in the Raman peak, but I have estimated (based upon the assumption that the vertical axis is linear in scale), that the FWHM is around 10 per cm for the "impact diamond" in the Chinese Glass. This is likely due to strain and crystal defects within the diamond structure, something that occurs when we try to make synthetic diamonds in the lab using a process called Chemical Vapour Deposition (effectively the process is growing diamonds from carbon vapour). Such processes leading to good quality synthetic diamonds have typical FWHM of around 5-10 per cm. So one can pose the question: Are the diamonds found in the Chinese Glass formed from a carbon Vapour phase, i.e. from carbon vaporised by the extreme (but short) temperatures and pressures of an impact?

Admittedly this is speculative and depends upon the scale of the graph, as pointed out above. But the very fact that we have diamonds that have penetrated the glass (which analysis suggests is of pure silica and thus has a very high melting point which is also claimed to be difficult to achieve with the technology of a neolithic culture), is quite noteworthy.

So while I dont think it should be connected to the YDB impact hypothesis, it could still be evidence of an impact event at some point in the past. When in the past is also the big question, as pre-history is a very long time.

Jonny







The path to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns. - David M Raup