An archeological dig has revealed evidence of a massive cosmic airburst event around 3,600 years ago that ruined a whole city near the Dead Sea in the Middle East. The event was bigger than the famous Tunguska airburst occasion in Russia in 1908, with a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The event flattened the growing city of Tall el-Hammam, located in what is now Jordan.
An archeological dig has actually uncovered proof of a huge cosmic airburst occasion approximately 3,600 years ago that destroyed a whole city near the Dead Sea in the Middle East. The occasion was bigger than the well-known Tunguska airburst event in Russia in 1908, with a blast 1,000 times more effective than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The event flattened the growing city of Tall el-Hammam, situated in what is now Jordan.
The area around Tall el-Hammam is different nevertheless, in that since the end of the Middle Bronze Age, this area in eastern Jordan suffered some sort of civilization-ending catastrophe, and stayed unoccupied for the next five-to-seven hundred years. (b) Artists evidence-based restoration of palace site on upper tall, along with modern-day excavation.
An airburst-related influx of salt produced hypersalinity in the surrounding soil, making agriculture impossible, causing a 600-year-long desertion of?about 120 local settlements within a? 25-km radius.
” We believe the surge may have vaporized or sprinkled hazardous levels of Dead Sea seawater throughout the valley,” wrote a group of research collaborators in a post in The Conversation (archaeologist Phil Silvia, geophysicist Allen West, geologist Ted Bunch and area physicist Malcolm LeCompte). “Without crops, no one could live in the valley for up to 600 years, till the minimal rains in this desert-like environment cleaned the salt out of the fields.”
Read the teams paper in Nature Scientific ReportsMore information about the Tall el-Hammam excavation can be found at this website
Lead image caption: This is an artists depiction of a 10-kilometer (6-mile) size asteroid striking the Earth. Credit: Don Davis/Southwest Research Institute.
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Utilizing evidence discovered in the dig together with an online impact calculator, the scientists estimate an area rock approximately 50 meters large exploded about 4 km (2.5 miles) above the Earth, sending a blinding flash and a wave of heat at 2,000 degrees (3,600 F). This would have instantly incinerated wood structures and bodies, and melted any metal items like swords or spears, and even pottery and mudbrick structures.
However the destruction wasnt over. A few seconds later, an enormous shockwave leveled whatever, consisting of a 4-to-5-story palace complex and a large 4-m-thick mudbrick fortification wall.
The authors of the paper, released in Nature Scientific Reports, state that although this doesnt fall under their location of knowledge, “an eyewitness description of this 3600-year-old devastating occasion may have been given as an oral tradition that eventually became the composed biblical account about the damage of Sodom.” Sodom was the city, which, according to scriptural texts, was damaged for its lecherousness, with stones and fire falling from the sky. Nevertheless, this story originates from a time when many natural disasters were blamed on the anger of the gods.
Area of Tall el-Hammam. In lots of sites in the Middle East, archeological digs or research studies reveal several layers of past habitation that have nationalist or spiritual significance for more than one ethnic group, where the victor of wars or conquests constructed upon the ruins of the city or structures it simply dominated– with the cycle duplicating over the millenniums. The region around Tall el-Hammam is different however, in that considering that the end of the Middle Bronze Age, this area in eastern Jordan suffered some sort of civilization-ending catastrophe, and remained empty for the next five-to-seven hundred years.
This mystery is being investigated by researchers from several universities and organizations and archeologists have been working at the Tall el-Hammam site considering that 2005. Even the earliest archaeological excavations revealed the existence of unusual products, consisting of melted mudbrick pieces, melted pottery, ash, charcoal, charred seeds, and burned fabrics, all intermixed with crushed mudbrick. Additionally, more digs revealed extraordinary damage.
The scientists got rid of the usual suspects, such as warfare, fires, volcanic eruption, or earthquakes due to the fact that these events were unlikely to cause the type of destruction they discovered at the website, and none of those events might have produced the intense heat needed to cause the melting that they discovered. Then the excavators discovered spherules of shocked quartz, a telltale sign of a sudden and extreme high?temperature event such as a cosmic effect.
Catastrophic leveling of the palace at TeH. (a) Artists evidence-based reconstruction of the 4-to-5-story palace that was? ~? 52 m long and 27 m large prior to its destruction. (b) Artists evidence-based restoration of palace website on upper tall, in addition to modern-day excavation. “MB II” marks the top of 1650-BCE Middle Bronze debris. Note that the field around the excavation is basically flat, unlike the view in panel a. Initially, parts of the 4-story palace were? ~? 12?+? m tall, but later, just a couple of courses of mudbricks remain on stone foundations, identified as “wall residues”. Part of the structure of the enormous wall around the palace is at the bottom. Debris from in between sheared walls has actually been eliminated by excavation. A contrast of panel a to panel b shows that millions of mudbricks from the upper parts of the palace and other structures are missing out on. Credit: West, et al.
” After eleven seasons of excavations, the website excavators independently concluded that evidence pointed to a possible cosmic impact,” the team composed in their paper. “They contacted our outside group of experts from multiple impact-related and other disciplines to investigate prospective formation mechanisms for the uncommon suite of high-temperature evidence.”
While an asteroid effect could have created all the evidence found by the archaeologists, that type of occasion was dismissed since there was no evidence of a crater in the location.
Using an effect calculator, a group of 21 scientists determined the most likely reason for the destruction was a cosmic air burst brought on by a comet or meteor. Their calculations showed such an event would result in the unusal destruction discovered by archaeologists, such as pottery sherds with external surfaces merged glass, some bubbled as if they were boiled, mudbrick pieces and “severe disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in neighboring human beings.”