3,600 years ago, a 50-meter-wide meteor exploded in the sky and destroyed a town near the Dead Sea



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An archaeological dig has uncovered evidence of a massive cosmic explosion around 3,600 years ago that destroyed an entire city near the Dead Sea in the Middle East. The event was larger than the famous Tunguska air explosion in Russia in 1908, with an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The event destroyed the flourishing city of Tall el-Hammam, located in present-day Jordan.

Using evidence uncovered during the dig and an online impact calculator, researchers estimate that a space rock about 50 meters wide exploded about 4 km (2.5 miles) in the above the Earth, sending a blinding lightning and a heat wave at 2000 degrees (3600 F). This would have immediately incinerated wooden structures and bodies, and melted all metallic objects like swords or spears, and even pottery and mud brick structures.

But the destruction was not over. Seconds later, a massive shock wave swept through everything, including a 4-5 story palace complex and a large mud brick fortification wall 4m thick.

The authors of the article, published in Nature Scientific Reports, say that while it is beyond their area of ​​expertise, “an eyewitness description of this 3,600-year-old catastrophic event may have been handed down as a tradition. oral which eventually became the written biblical account of the destruction of Sodom. Sodom was the city that according to biblical texts was destroyed for its lust, with stones and fire falling from the sky. However, this story comes from a time when many natural disasters were blamed on the wrath of the gods.

Location of Tall el-Hammam. Photo from the south of the Levant, looking north, showing the Dead Sea, the site’s location (TeH) and neighboring countries. The Dead Sea Fault, the fault line marking the boundary of a major tectonic plate, crosses the region. Credits: NASA, West et al.

In many sites in the Middle East, excavations or archaeological studies reveal several layers of past dwellings which have religious or nationalist significance for more than one ethnic group, where the winner of wars or conquests has built on the ruins of the city or the buildings he has just conquered – with the cycle that repeats itself over the millennia. The region around Tall el-Hammam is different, however, in that since the end of the Middle Bronze Age this region in eastern Jordan has suffered some sort of calamity ending civilization and has remained unoccupied for the next five to seven hundred years. In addition, this area was originally one of the most productive agricultural lands in the region, and one which had supported continuously flourishing civilizations for at least 3,000 years. But suddenly, the soil in the area was flooded with salts where nothing would grow.

This mystery is being studied by researchers from several universities and organizations and archaeologists have been working on the site of Tall el-Hammam since 2005. Even the first archaeological excavations have revealed the presence of unusual materials, including fragments of molten raw bricks, from the molten pottery, ashes, charcoal, charred seeds and burnt textiles, all mixed with pulverized mud brick. In addition, further excavations have revealed incredible destruction.

The researchers ruled out the usual suspects, such as war, fires, volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes, as these events were unlikely to cause the type of destruction they found at the site, and none of them. these events could not have produced the intense heat required to cause the melt that they found. But then excavators found shocked quartz spherules, a telltale sign of an intense and sudden high-temperature event such as a cosmic impact.

Catastrophic leveling of the TeH palace. (a) Artist’s evidence-based reconstruction of the 4-5 storey palace which was? ~? 52m long and 27m wide before its destruction. (b) Evidence-based reconstruction by the artist of the palace site on the upper height, as well as modern excavations. “MB II” marks the top of the Middle Bronze rubble from 1650 BC. Note that the field around the excavation is essentially flat, unlike the panel view ‘a‘. Originally, parts of the 4-story palace were? ~? 12? +? M high, but later only a few mud brick courtyards on stone foundations, labeled as “wall remains “. Part of the foundation for the massive wall around the palace is at the bottom. Debris between the sheared walls was removed by excavation. A panel comparison ‘a‘at the panel’b‘shows that millions of mud bricks from the upper parts of the palace and other buildings have disappeared. Credit: West, et al.

“After eleven seasons of excavation, excavators at the site independently concluded that there was evidence pointing to a possible cosmic impact,” the team wrote in their article. “They contacted our group of external experts from multiple disciplines related to impacts and others to investigate the potential formation mechanisms of the unusual high-temperature suite of evidence.”

While an asteroid impact could have created all the evidence found by archaeologists, this type of event was rejected as there was no evidence of a crater in the area.

Using an impact calculator, a group of 21 researchers determined that the most likely cause of the destruction was an explosion of cosmic air caused by a comet or meteor. Their calculations showed that such an event would result in the unusual destruction found by archaeologists, such as pottery shards with exterior surfaces melted into glass, some bubbling as if boiled, fragments of mud bricks and “a extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans ”.

In addition, an influx of salt from the aerial explosions produced hypersalinity in the surrounding soil, making agriculture impossible, causing the abandonment for 600 years of about 120 regional settlements within a 25 km radius.

“We believe the explosion may have vaporized or projected toxic levels of saltwater from the Dead Sea across the valley,” wrote a group of research collaborators in an article in The Conversation (archaeologist Phil Silvia, geophysicist Allen West, geologist Ted Bunch and space physicist Malcolm LeCompte). “Without harvests, no one could live in the valley for up to 600 years, until the minimal rainfall in this desert climate washes away the salt from the fields. “

Read the team’s article in Nature Scientific Reports
More information on the Tall el-Hammam excavations can be found on this website

Caption for main image: This is an artist’s depiction of an asteroid 10 kilometers (6 miles) in diameter hitting Earth. Credit: Don Davis / Southwestern Research Institute.

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