Retracted study proposed cosmic airburst at Tall el-Hammam around 1650 BCE

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Key facts

• Tall el-Hammam is a Middle Bronze Age site in the southern Jordan Valley. The excavation project describes the city as the valley's largest and estimates its area at roughly ten times that of contemporary Jerusalem; these are project estimates.
• Steven G. Collins of Trinity Southwest University led the excavations. The Nature paper and available excavation histories date the work from 2005, rather than 2006.
• The 2021 Scientific Reports paper placed the destruction horizon around 1650 BCE. It reported about 1.5 metres of shattered and melted mudbrick and a 2.5-centimetre soot layer, along with burned human remains, pottery reported as melted into green glass and salt samples of 4–25%—not a five-foot layer of soot.
• The paper described a multidisciplinary effort involving 21 researchers over about 15 years and reported that the site was not reoccupied for roughly 700 years.
• The authors proposed a low-altitude, “Tunguska-sized” cosmic airburst. Their interpretation of the glass as brief, extreme heat, the microscopic quartz features as shock evidence, the proposed Dead Sea connection, modelled temperatures above 3,600°F, the 740 mph shock wave and the inference that none of about 8,000 inhabitants survived were claims in the study, not established findings.
• The project has proposed a possible connection with the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah; that identification was not demonstrated.
• Scientific Reports retracted the paper in November 2023 after post-publication scrutiny, stating that the evidence was insufficient to support the airburst conclusion and that other explanations could not be ruled out.

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