Fire & Brimstone

Fire and Brimstone: A Giant Space Rock Demolished an Ancient Middle Eastern City and Everyone in It:

About 3,600 years ago [~1,650 BCE] a giant space rock, travelling at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph), demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city, now called Tall el-Hammam, killing everyone in it. Accounts of the disaster probably generated the Biblical myth of Sodom, which 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 city inhabitants were killed.

The rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground – a blast around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Air temperatures would have rapidly risen above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks, and pottery melted. 

Seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – bodies torn apart and bones blasted into small fragments.

About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.

[Needless to say, religious nutters will attribute this natural phenomenon to "God" – punishment for activities of which they disapprove.]

At the site, scientists found finely fractured sand grains called shocked quartz that only form at 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (5 gigapascals) – imagine six 68-ton Abrams military tanks stacked on your thumb.

The destruction layer also contains tiny diamonoids, as hard as diamonds, each smaller than a flu virus. Wood and plants were turned into this diamond-like material by the fireball’s high pressures and temperatures.

A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea nature .