Not every big meteor has to wipe out most of life on Earth. Some can just wipe out a small city and possibly inspire a Bible story.

The town was Tall el-Hammam. Well, that’s what it’s called today. It was a thriving town of 8,000 people and their livestock. Then about 3,600 years ago, a meteor entered the atmosphere, exploding in a fireball at about 4 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, close to this small town. With a blast 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima’s atomic bombing, the town was destroyed by the resulting 1,200 kph shockwave and extreme temperatures, around 2,000 degrees Celsius.

No one in the town survived, and the town itself was wiped out. Then 22 kilometers away and a minute later, that same shockwave hit the biblical city of Jericho, whose walls came tumbling down.

All of the data for this story was collected over 15 years through excavations by a cast of hundreds. The evidence was published in the journal Scientific Reports, and the 21 co-authors were made up of everyone from archaeologists to geochemists to paleobotanists to cosmic-impact experts and everything in between, including medical doctors.

Now I said there weren’t any survivors, but some of you might be familiar with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible. Sodom is destroyed by a rain of stones and fire, and it’s thought to have been in the same-ish location as Tall el-Hammam. It’s distinctly possible that this biblical tale is an eye-witness account of this meteor impact, and its destruction was passed down for generations until finally recorded in writing. That would also make it the first written record of a meteor strike of this magnitude.

And that’s why we are working to understand the hows and whys of asteroids and meteors. It doesn’t have to be a dinosaur-killer to be destructive.

More Information

A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom (The Conversation)

“A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” Ted E. Bunch et al., 2021 September 20, Scientific Reports