The airburst, according to the paper, may also explain the “anomalously high concentrations of salt” found in the destruction layer - an average of 4% in the sediment and as high as 25% in some samples. “We have shocked quartz from this layer, and that means there were incredible pressures involved to shock the quartz crystals - quartz is one of the hardest minerals it’s very hard to shock.” These are sand grains containing cracks that form only under very high pressure,” Kennett said of one of many lines of evidence that point to a large airburst near Tall el-Hammam. “I think one of the main discoveries is shocked quartz. Kennett, professor emeritus in UCSB’s Department of Earth Science. Tiny iron- and silica-rich spherules turned up in their analysis, as did melted metals. The distribution of bones indicated “extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans.”įor Kennett, further proof of the airburst was found by conducting many different kinds of analyses on soil and sediments from the critical layer.
The shock of the explosion over Tall el-Hammam was enough to level the city, flattening the palace and surrounding walls and mudbrick structures, according to the paper. “There’s evidence of a large cosmic airburst, close to this city called Tall el-Hammam,” Kennett said of an explosion similar to the Tunguska Event, a roughly 12-megaton airburst that occurred in 1908, when a 56-60-meter meteor pierced the Earth’s atmosphere over the Eastern Siberian Taiga. Their results are published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. Silvia’s research effort to determine what happened at this city 3,650 years ago.
The charred and melted materials at Tall el-Hammam looked familiar, and a group of researchers including impact scientist Allen West and Kennett joined Trinity Southwest University biblical scholar Philip J. “We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius,” said Kennett, whose research group at the time happened to have been building the case for an older cosmic airburst about 12,800 years ago that triggered major widespread burning, climatic changes and animal extinctions. In addition to the debris one would expect from destruction via warfare and earthquakes, they found pottery shards with outer surfaces melted into glass, “bubbled” mudbrick and partially melted building material, all indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, much hotter than anything the technology of the time could produce. Credit: Phil Silviaīut there is a 1.5-meter interval in the Middle Bronze Age II stratum that caught the interest of some researchers for its “highly unusual” materials. Researchers stand near the ruins of ancient walls, with the destruction layer about midway down each exposed wall. “Much of where the early cultural complexity of humans developed is in this general area.”Ī favorite site for archaeologists and biblical scholars, the mound hosts evidence of culture all the way from the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, all compacted into layers as the highly strategic settlement was built, destroyed, and rebuilt over millennia. “It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. In the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Credit: Allen West and Jennifer Rice An Ancient Disaster Artist’s evidence-based depiction of the blast, which had the power of 1,000 Hiroshimas.
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