The Meteor That Destroyed An Ancient Metropolis
It year was 1600 BC. Roughly. About halfway through the bronze age, a meteor exploded 4 kilometers above an ancient metropolis Beth Haram in current Jordan. What can we learn from this?
Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay
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About 3600 years ago the inhabitants of the ancient city of Beth Haram in the Eastern part of the Jordan valley were going through their lives just like any other Bronze age day. But that was coming to a very sudden and brutal end as a meteor came rushing in at about 61,000 kilometers per hour. About 4 kilometers above the city it exploded violently. Very violently as the explosion was about a thousand times more powerful than the one in Hiroshima.
If there was anyone unlucky enough to look directly at the explosion, they went blind immediately. But that would be the least of their problems as the temperature of the air would rise to about 2,000° Celsius in an instant. The whole city burned. Then, just a few seconds later a massive shockwave hit the metropolis at about 1,200 kph. This shockwave was more destructive than any of the tornadoes humans ever saw. Pieces of buildings flying not hundreds of meters but into the neighboring valleys.
About a minute later the remains of the explosion arrived at Jericho which is about 22 kilometers West of Beth Haram. Even there it destroyed city walls and burned the city. This might sound like science fiction but according to Phillip Silvia and his colleagues from the Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, it did happen exactly like this.
They were led to this conclusion by the results of 15 years of digging performed by hundreds of people. Additional dozens of experts from the USA, Canada, and other countries analyzed the materials in great detail including shock silica and tiny diamonds that were created in this extreme event. The researchers also performed experiments in which they verified that the materials could even come from this catastrophe. And interestingly enough some even think Beth Haram could be Sodom from the Bible.
Today the place of this ancient apocalypse is known as Tall el-Hammam in Jordan. It was inhabited as early as about 6,300 years ago and people have lived there ever since. Beth Haram was actually one of the largest cities with its about 8,000 people. But the catastrophe didn’t lead to the end of human life in the area though it was deserted for several centuries. But humans eventually came back. But what’s the truly scary part about this story is that it will surely one day happen again. It’s only a question of time before a similar explosion devastates an inhabited area again. Well, unless sci-fi and planetary defenses save us.
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