The twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah prosper because of their great deposits of salt, which are mined by an army of slaves. The study was published in the journalВ Scientific Reports.Taglines: The cities that mocked the very name of GodвЂ¦ The vengeance that tore the Earth asunder!

Importantly, it may the first written record of such a catastrophic event,вЂќ Moore writes. вЂњCould this be an ancient eyewitness account? If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam may be the second-oldest destruction of a human settlement by a cosmic impact event, after the village of Abu Hureyra in Syria about 12,800 years ago. The Bible describes an urban center near the Dead Sea that was fully devastated by stones and fire falling from the sky, killing all the cityвЂ™s inhabitants. The researchers believe that the oral description of the cityвЂ™s destruction was passed down from generation to generation until it was registered as the story of the Sodom and Gomorrah. The surfaces of the pottery are also spattered with small melted metallic grains, such as iridium, platinum and zirconium silicate, with a melting point over 1.500вњ¬ Woods and plants in Tall el-Hamman turned into these diamond-like materials because of the temperature and high pressure from the space rock.ДЄt the laboratory, experiments also showed that the pottery and mudbricks at Tall el-Hammam melted at temperatures above 1.500вњ¬ вЂ“ hot enough to melt a car in minutes. The layer of dirt also had very small diamondoids - variants of a carbon cage molecule that are as hard as diamonds. The researchers found finely fractured sand grains called shocked quartz that is only formed at 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. It was likely similar to the one that cleared out 80 million trees in Tunguska, Russia, in 1908, and much smaller than the one that took out the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, Moore explained.

Image credit: The researchersДЄfter dismissing an earthquake, a fire, and a volcanic eruption as possible cataclysmic events, the researchers concluded that a small asteroid must have been the main culprit behind the cityвЂ™s destruction. None of the 8,000 people living at the moment in Tall el-Hamman or any animals survived, Moore wrote, with their bodies torn apart and their bodies blasted into fragments.ДЄDVERTISEMENT A map of the location of the city. It moved at about 740 miles per hour, with deadly winds demolishing every building. Seconds after the meteorite, a shock from the explosion smashed into the city, Moore said. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 2,000вњ¬,вЂќ writes co-author Christopher Moore, for the Conversation. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. вЂњFlashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles above the ground. This would indicate an anomalously high-temperature event, which they think was a space rock raising havoc in the city. In addition to what you would expect to find from destruction from earthquakes and warfare, the researchers also found pottery shards with surfaced melted into glass and partially melted building material.

Sodom and gomorrah movie 2000