{"id":28833,"date":"2021-09-20T16:02:36","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T14:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/?p=28833"},"modified":"2021-09-20T16:09:25","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T14:09:25","slug":"a-tunguska-sized-airburst-destroyed-tall-el-hammam-a-middle-bronze-age-city-in-the-jordan-valley-near-the-dead-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/?p=28833","title":{"rendered":"A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea<span class=\"badge-status\" style=\"background:#787878\">OPEN ACCESS<\/span>&nbsp;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"justify-text\">Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm A. LeCompte, A. Victor Adedeji, James H. Wittke, T. David Burleigh, Robert E. Hermes, Charles Mooney, Dale Batchelor, Wendy S. Wolbach, Joel Kathan, Gunther Kletetschka, Mark C. L. Patterson, Edward C. Swindel, Timothy Witwer, George A. Howard, Siddhartha Mitra, Christopher R. Moore, Kurt Langworthy, James P. Kennett, Allen West &amp; Phillip J. Silvia<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scientific Reports, Volume 11, Article number: 18632 (2021)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-021-97778-3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>LINK (OPEN ACCESS)<\/strong><\/a><br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-021-97778-3.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>PDF (OPEN ACCESS)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"justify-text\">&#8220;We present evidence that in\u2009~\u20091650 BCE (~\u20093600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a\u2009~\u200950-m-wide bolide detonated with\u2009~\u20091000\u00d7\u2009more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. A city-wide\u2009~\u20091.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~\u20095\u201310 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 \u00b0C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+\u2009m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~\u20094 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a\u2009~\u2009300\u2013600-year-long abandonment of\u2009~\u2009120 regional settlements within a\u2009&gt;\u200925-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city\/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst\/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities\/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ted E. Bunch, Malcolm A. LeCompte, A. Victor Adedeji, James H. Wittke, T. David Burleigh, Robert E. Hermes, Charles Mooney, Dale Batchelor, Wendy S. Wolbach, Joel Kathan, Gunther Kletetschka, Mark C. L. Patterson, Edward C&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[339,118],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28835,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28833\/revisions\/28835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karmaka.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}