A day ago about 3. 600 years, the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam they went about their daily activities without knowing that an invisible icy space rock was approaching them at a speed of approximately 61. 10 kilometers per hour.
Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a huge fireball about 4 kilometers above the ground.
The explosion was about 1. 000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb .
The shocked city dwellers who looked at her were instantly blinded. The air temperature rose rapidly above 3. 600 degrees Fahrenheit (2. 000 Celsius degrees).
Clothes and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, adobe and pottery began to melt.
Almost immediately, the entire city caught fire.
A few seconds later, a massive seismic wave shook the town. Moving to about 1. 200 km / h, it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded.
Deadly winds hit the city, demolishing all the buildings. They started the 12 upper meters from the four-story palace and dumped the scrambled rubble into the next valley.
None of 8. 000 people or animals d e the city survived : their bodies were shattered and their bones exploded into splinters.
About a minute later, to 22 km west of Tall el-Hammam, the blast winds reached the biblical city of Jericho . Its walls came down and the city burned to the ground.
It all sounds like the climax of a Hollywood disaster movie. How do we know that all this really happened in that place near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?
Getting answers required almost 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people.
It also involved detailed analysis of material excavated by more than two dozen scientists at 10 US states, as well as Canada and the Czech Republic.
When our group finally recently published the evidence in Sc magazine Scientific Reports , the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic impact experts, and physicians.
This is how we constructed this image of devastation in the past.
Firestorm all over the city
Years ago, when archaeologists looked at excavations of the ruined city, they could see a dark and messy blanket of about 1 , 5 meters thick of coal, ash and adobe and melted pottery.
It was obvious that an intense firestorm had destroyed this city long ago. This dark band was renamed the Destruction Cloak .
No one was sure what exactly happened, but that layer was not caused by a volcano, an earthquake or a war. None of that is capable of melting metal, adobe and ceramic.
To find out what could have been, our group used the “ Online impact calculator ” to model scenarios that are fit the evidence.
Built by impact experts, this tool allows researchers to estimate the many details of a cosmic impact event, based on other known impact events and nuclear detonations.
Apparently the culprit in Tall el-Hammam had been a small asteroid similar to the one it shot down 80 million trees in Tunguska, Russia in 1908. It would have been a much smaller version of the miles-wide giant rock that pushed the dinosaurs to extinction ago 65 millions of years.
We had a possible cause. Now we needed proof of what happened that day in Tall el-Hammam.
Finding “diamonds” in the ground
Our investigation revealed a remarkably wide variety of evidence.
At the site there are finely fractured sand grains called impacted quartz that only form at 742. 000 pounds per square inch of pressure (5 gigapascals); imagine six Abrams military tanks of 68 tons stacked on your thumb.
The layer of destruction also contains tiny diamonoids which, As the name suggests, they are as hard as diamonds. Each one is smaller than a flu virus.
It appears that the wood and plants in the area were instantly turned into this diamond-like material by the high pressures and temperatures of the fireball.
Experiments with laboratory furnaces showed that the bubbled pottery and mud bricks at Tall el-Hammam liquefied at higher temperatures at 1. 500 ° C. That’s hot enough to melt a car in a matter of minutes.
The destruction layer also contains material balls melted smaller than airborne dust particles. Called spherules, they are made of vaporized iron and sand that melted to approximately 1. 590 ° C.
Additionally, ceramic and molten glass surfaces are speckled with small, melted metallic grains, including iridium with a melting point of 2. 200 ° C, platinum melting at 1. 768 ° C, and zirconium silicate at 1. 540 ° C.
Taken together, all this evidence shows that temperatures in the city increased more than volcanoes, war and normal city fires. The only natural process left is a cosmic impact .
The same evidence is found at known impact sites, such as Tunguska and the Chicxulub crater, created by the asteroid that caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.
A remaining puzzle is why the city and more than 100 settlements in other areas were abandoned for several centuries after this devastation.
It may be that the high levels of salt deposited during the impact event made cultivation impossible.
Not yet we’re sure, but we believe the explosion may have vaporized or splashed toxic levels of saltwater from the Dead Sea throughout the valley.
Without crops, no one would have been able to live there for a few 600 years, until the minimum rainfall in this climate of seritics will wash the salt from the fields.
Did any witnesses survive the explosion?
An oral description of the city’s destruction may have been passed down for generations until it was recorded as the biblical Sodom story .
The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea: stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires and the city’s inhabitants died.
Could this be an ancient eyewitness account?
If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest destruction of a human settlement by a cosmic impact event, after the village of Abu Hureyra in Syria some 12. 800 year os.
It is important to note that it may be the first written record of such a catastrophic event.
Overwhelming
What is scary is that it is almost certain it won’t be the last time a human city faces this fate.
Tunguska-sized air blasts, like the one that occurred in Tall el-Hammam, can devastate entire cities and regions, and pose a serious danger today.
Since September 2021, there is more of 26. 000 known asteroids and a hundred short-period comets near the Land. One will inevitably crash into the planet. Millions more remain undetected.
Unless ground-based or orbiting telescopes detect these rogue objects, the world may not have any warning, as do the people of Tall el-Hammam.
This article was co written by research collaborators, The archeologist Phil Silvia , the geophysicist Allen West , geologist Ted Bunch and the spatial physicist Malcolm LeCompte .
Read the original article here .
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