Richard White, the chief editor of Scientific Reports, told us: More criticism of the article can be found on PubPeer. Other members of the research team are affiliated with North Carolina State University, Northeastern Arizona University, Elizabeth City State University, New Mexico Institute On Mining & Technology, Charles University in Prague, and the United States Navy. Registered to the same address is the “Rising Light Group Inc.” and a consultancy business. Located in a residential area in Prescott, AZ. Bik also wondered about the affiliation of two of the co-authors, Alan West and Timothy Witwer, which is listed as the Comet Research Group and is: (Boslough initially misidentified the publication as Nature, for which he later apologized.)īoslough pointed out “ my model of asteroid airbursts is cited as the mechanism by which God smote this evil city.” He then noted that the senior author of the study was Phillip Silvia, an “engineer, theologian, archaeologist” and the director of publications at Trinity Southwest University, an apparently unaccredited evangelical school located in a strip mall in Albuquerque, whose motto is “Flexible Adult Higher Education Upholding Biblical Authority.” (Silvia earned his PhD from Trinity Southwest in 2015.)Įarlier this week, Elisabeth Bik joined the critics, identifying an image in the paper with signs of having been doctored. It also garnered coverage from a slew of news outlets - many of which reprinted an opinion piece about the findings by co-author Christopher Moore, of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina.īut shortly after publication, Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, took to Twitter to raise several concerns about the article. The paper has been a big hit, according to Altmetric, which ranks it as the top article for online attention among papers published at the same time. Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.
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). An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300-600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius.
Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m 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. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 ☌. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 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. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. To the lay reader - and to peer reviewers and editors, evidently - the article, “ A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” makes at least a superficially plausible and scientifically rigorous case. Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been the retelling of the devastation wrought by an exploding asteroid in or around the year 1,650 BCE.