- 3290 - METEOR - destroys a city? As of September 2021, there are more than 26,000 known near-Earth asteroids and a hundred short-period near-Earth comets. One will inevitably crash into the Earth. Millions more remain undetected, and some may be headed toward the Earth now.
--------------------- 3290 - METEOR - destroys a city?
- Middle Eastern city, Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph.
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- Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
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- The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks, and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.
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- Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph, 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 of the four-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley.
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- None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived. Their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.
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- About a minute later, 14 miles 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.
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- How do we know that all of this actually happened near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?
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- 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people were involved with detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in 10 states in the U.S., as well as Canada, and the Czech Republic.
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- 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts, and medical doctors. Here’s how we built up this picture of devastation in the past.
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- When archaeologists looked out over excavations of the ruined city, they could see a dark, roughly five-foot-thick jumbled layer of charcoal, ash, melted mudbricks, and melted pottery. It was obvious that an intense firestorm had destroyed this city long ago. This dark band came to be called the destruction layer.
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- No one was exactly sure what had happened, but that layer wasn’t caused by a volcano, earthquake, or warfare. None of them are capable of melting metal, mudbricks, and pottery.
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- The culprit at Tall el-Hammam was a small asteroid similar to the one that knocked down 80 million trees in Tunguska, Russia in 1908. It would have been a much smaller version of the giant miles-wide rock that pushed the dinosaurs into extinction 65 million ago.
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- At the site, there are finely fractured sand grains called shocked quartz that only form at 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (five gigapascals). This pressure is equivalent to six 68-ton Abrams military tanks stacked on your thumb.
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- The destruction layer also contains tiny diamondoids that are as hard as diamonds. Each one is smaller than a flu virus. It appears that wood and plants in the area were instantly turned into this diamond-like material by the fireball’s high pressures and temperatures.
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- Experiments with laboratory furnaces showed that the bubbled pottery and mudbricks at Tall el-Hammam liquefied at temperatures above 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt an automobile within minutes.
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- The destruction layer also contains tiny balls of melted material smaller than airborne dust particles. Called spherules, they are made of vaporized iron and sand that melted at about 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
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- In addition, the surfaces of the pottery and melt glass are speckled with tiny melted metallic grains, including iridium with a melting point of 4,435 degrees Fahrenheit, platinum that melts at 3,215 degrees Fahrenheit, and zirconium silicate at 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Together, all this evidence shows that temperatures in the city rose higher than those of volcanoes, warfare, and normal city fires. The only natural process left is a cosmic impact.
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- The same evidence is found at known impact sites, such as Tunguska and the Chicxulub crater, created by the asteroid that triggered the dinosaur extinction.
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- Why was the city and over 100 other area settlements abandoned for several centuries after this devastation. It may be that high levels of salt deposited during the impact event made it impossible to grow crops.
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- Researchers think the explosion may have vaporized or splashed toxic levels of Dead Sea saltwater across the valley. Without crops, no one could live in the valley for up to 600 years, until the minimal rainfall in this desert-like climate washed the salt out of the fields.
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- It’s possible that an oral description of the city’s destruction may have been handed down for generations until it was recorded as the story of Biblical Sodom. 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 perished.
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- 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 about 12,800 years ago. It may be the first written record of such a catastrophic event.
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- It almost certainly won’t be the last time a human city meets this fate.
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- Tunguska-sized airbursts, such as the one that occurred at Tall el-Hammam, can devastate entire cities and regions, and they pose a severe modern-day hazard.
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- As of September 2021, there are more than 26,000 known near-Earth asteroids and a hundred short-period near-Earth comets. One will inevitably crash into the Earth. Millions more remain undetected, and some may be headed toward the Earth now.
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- Unless orbiting or ground-based telescopes detect these rogue objects, the world may have no warning, just like the people of Tall el-Hammam
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- October 1, 2021 METEOR - destroys a city? 3290
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--------------------- --- Friday, October 1, 2021 ---------------------------
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