[Rockhounds] Prehistoric Tunguska sized airburst in Jordan Valley proposed

[linda at middleearthminerals.com]

Thank you, Paul, this is absolutely fascinating.  A bronze-age city seems to
have been completely destroyed by a Tunguska-sized or larger meteor
airburst.  It might possibly have been the city of Sodom that the bible says
was destroyed by God.  They found sheared-off walls, melted bricks, melted
ceramics, melted metal grains (including iridium, the telltale element for
the dinosaurs' meteor), and a few human bones but nowhere near the city's
population - many, many tiny bone fragments that could be human or animal.
Also, the area, usually the most fertile part of that region, was abandoned
for 600 years afterwards, perhaps because of the layer of salt everywhere.
The airburst might have flung nearby salt deposits over the area, making it
unusable for farming for hundreds of years.  

I particularly liked the way they ruled out warfare (layers of destruction
by warfare could be found via broken arrows and such, but not coincident
with this destruction), earthquakes (again, those could be seen to have
happened, but not at this particular time or place), etc.  Apparently the
biblical city of Jericho is close by and I think they said it, too, was
leveled by the airburst.

I only skimmed part of the Nature article, because it is LONG and detailed.
It's going to take hours to read so I'm saving it for later.  Apologies if I
have misrepresented anything from the article in my quick reading & summary.


I always wondered if Tunguska was unique on our planet.  Wow.  This is truly
amazing.

Linda

-----Original Message-----
From: Rockhounds <rockhounds-bounces at rockhounds.drizzle.com> On Behalf Of
Paul
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2021 4:59 PM
To: Rockhound List <rockhounds at rockhounds.drizzle.com>
Subject: [Rockhounds] Prehistoric Tunguska sized airburst in Jordan Valley
proposed

Bunch, T.E., LeCompte, M.A., Adedeji, A.V. et al. A Tunguska sized airburst
destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near
the Dead Sea. Sci Rep 11, 18632 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97778-3
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3

Yours,

Paul H.

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