"But Moore says that byMoore's research involves digging down to layers of soil that would have been exposed in the Younger Dryas period, around 12,800 years ago when the climate suddenly cooled in the northern hemisphere. Finding them so far apart adds to the story: Quartz doesn't undergo metamorphosis and fly 500 miles without a significant impact. "The Science Open journal Airbursts and Cratering Impacts published Moore's study of shock-fractured quartz this May.One of Moore's dig sites for this study was Flamingo Bay, a shallow wetland on the Department of Energy's Savannah River nuclear site. Statistically speaking, most future meteor impacts would have short-lived, local effects rather than global, long-term impacts, he says. "We need to think much more about how these impacts may have affected human societies in the past," he says.