Uploaded September 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
TALL EL-HAMMAM, JORDAN — Scientists discovered that an ancient city near where the Biblical city of Sodom would have been was destroyed centuries ago by a meteor that exploded above the city and burned it to a cinder. Here are the details:
In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers showed that the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam was struck by a massive airborne explosion with the power of 1,000 atom bombs.
The city was completely destroyed by the resulting firestorm and pressure waves. Its remains are located in Jordan, near Israel’s Dead Sea.
Researchers believe the fiery explosion from up high struck around 3,600 years ago and might have given rise to the story of Sodom, which according to Biblical text was destroyed as punishment for immorality.
The scientists say evidence strongly suggests that the city was struck from above by a meteorite mostly composed of ice, which exploded in the air because of very high temperatures caused by friction in Earth’s atmosphere.
City dwellers who saw the explosion would have been blinded instantly. Clothing and wood burst into flames immediately. Swords, spears and mud bricks melted as the city was engulfed in flames.
The shock wave that followed blew apart the buildings, causing charred bricks to rain down on villages many miles away.
The researchers said 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.
A minute after the explosion, the shockwave reached the city of Jericho, 22 kilometers away.
It blew Jericho’s walls down and the city burned to the ground. The soil around Tall el-Hammam was also drenched with salt and could not be farmed for hundreds of years.
TALL EL-HAMMAM, JORDAN — Scientists discovered that an ancient city near where the Biblical city of Sodom would have been was destroyed centuries ago by a meteor that exploded above the city and burned it to a cinder. Here are the details:
In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers showed that the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam was struck by a massive airborne explosion with the power of 1,000 atom bombs.
The city was completely destroyed by the resulting firestorm and pressure waves. Its remains are located in Jordan, near Israel’s Dead Sea.
Researchers believe the fiery explosion from up high struck around 3,600 years ago and might have given rise to the story of Sodom, which according to Biblical text was destroyed as punishment for immorality.
The scientists say evidence strongly suggests that the city was struck from above by a meteorite mostly composed of ice, which exploded in the air because of very high temperatures caused by friction in Earth’s atmosphere.
City dwellers who saw the explosion would have been blinded instantly. Clothing and wood burst into flames immediately. Swords, spears and mud bricks melted as the city was engulfed in flames.
The shock wave that followed blew apart the buildings, causing charred bricks to rain down on villages many miles away.
The researchers said 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.
A minute after the explosion, the shockwave reached the city of Jericho, 22 kilometers away.
It blew Jericho’s walls down and the city burned to the ground. The soil around Tall el-Hammam was also drenched with salt and could not be farmed for hundreds of years.




![Antarctic Shipwreck: Search for 100 Year-Old Lost Ship Set to Begin
FALKLAND ISLANDS — An expedition to find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance will set sail to search the depths of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea next month, according to the BBC.
The iconic ship sank in November of 2015 after becoming trapped in Antarctic sea ice during an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic.
Now, funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the South African-registered research ship, the Agulhas [f]II will for a second time attempt to find it.
The same team failed in a previous attempt in 2019 when its autonomous underwater vehicle lost contact with the surface and as such the new expedition will utilize two different robot submersibles, known as SAAB [g]Sabertooths, to travel the estimated 900 meters down to the seabed.
According to the Expedition’s website, the Sabertooths will not be equipped to take samples from the wreck. Instead they will use cameras and scanners to undertake a high-resolution digital survey of the wreck.
The expedition will also undertake a program of sea ice monitoring and measurements. Antarctic Shipwreck: Search for 100 Year-Old Lost Ship Set to Begin](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pn7fAp77tVc/mqdefault.jpg)





![Antarctica’s ‘Glue’ Is Coming Unstuck.
ANTARCTICA — The 2017 calving of the A68 iceberg from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf was likely caused by thinning ice melange[d], the mix of windblown snow, iceberg debris and frozen seawater that normally acts to glue rifts together with larger blocks.
That’s according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found the circulation of ocean water beneath ice shelves and radiative warming from above gradually deteriorates the ice melange.
Counterintuitively, if the ice shelves themselves thin, rifts tend to heal, with average annual widening rates dropping from 79 to 22 meters, or 259 to 72 feet. Additionally, if both the shelves and the melange thinned, this also slowed rift widening.
Only when the melange thinned separately to the ice shelf was rift widening found to increase, from an average annual rate of 76 to 112 meters, or 249 to 367 feet.
The reason for that is that the ice melange starts out much thinner than the ice shelf itself, so when it thins down to 10 or 15 meters thick, it becomes akin to water, allowing the ice shelf rifts to be released and start to crack.
The study’s lead author, Eric Larour, cited by SciTechDaily, says this idea explains why the A68 iceberg was able to break from the Larsen C ice shelf in the dead of the Antarctic winter, because even in winter, warmer ocean water can reach the melange from below.
Previously scientists had thought such large iceberg calving events in the Antarctic Peninsula were caused by hydrofracturing, according to Larour, whereby ‘melt pools on the surface allow water to seep down through cracks in the ice shelf, which expand when the water freezes again,’ but this would not be possible in the dead of winter, with no melt pools present.
The study, then, partially explains how ice shelves can start retreating and becoming unstable decades before hydrofracturing could act on them, and this, according to one of the study’s co-authors, means “we may need to rethink our estimates about the timing and extent of sea level rise from polar ice loss — i.e., it could come sooner and with a bigger bang than expected.” Antarctica’s ‘Glue’ Is Coming Unstuck.](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rbVDd_H12es/mqdefault.jpg)