Tunguska-Like Event May Not Have Inspired Biblical Tale Of Sodom and Gomorrah After All

Dinosaur-killing asteroid strikes come along only once every tens or hundreds of millions of years. Encounters with smaller, but still damaging, space objects, occur much more frequently, however. We witnessed one such event with the power to injure 1,500 people, and the devastation near Tunguska, Siberia, indicates something even larger happened in 1908. 

Although many explanations have been offered for the Tunguska event, it is now widely accepted that a piece of asteroid or comet around 50-80 meters (160–262 feet) across exploded in the atmosphere, creating a shockwave that leveled a large area of forest. Had an object like this exploded over a city, instead of one of the least populated places on Earth, the results could have been devastating.

These almost universally accepted conclusions have inspired some scientists to search for cases where similar events might have occurred, triggering the collapse of civilizations. 

One of the examples in question was published in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports in 2021. The paper attributed the fall of the city of Tall el-Hammam in around 1,600 BCE to just such an airburst, based on a variety of lines of evidence, including very high temperature fires and shocked quartz.

That claim would probably be big news under any circumstances, but Tall el-Hammam lies in the Jordan Valley, and the timing attributed to the event fitted neatly into the idea that a version could have been incorporated into the Bible.  The authors proposed that to Bronze Age people, the event was so inexplicable it was seen as an act of God, and became a warning of the dangers of sin, with Tall el-Hammam morphing into either Sodom or Gomorrah.

IFLScience was one of the many, many outlets that covered the paper. We noted it had already come in for criticism from one of the scientists whose work was cited in the paper. Professor Mark Boslough of the University of New Mexico, an expert on airbursts, posted a thread on Twitter saying the paper misrepresented his modeling of the forces created by airbursts as supporting the conclusion, when it really contradicted it. Those tweets are now hidden, along with the rest of Boslough’s account, but on Bluesky, he recently reposted another critic attacking the swift “resurrection” of the paper in Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. Airbursts and Cratering Impacts has published just 14 papers since its creation two years ago, almost all by the same authors.

In reporting Boslough’s objection, we barely scratched the surface of what was to come, however. The paper’s thesis required the authors to roam over many fields, and they quickly found themselves criticized by experts in almost all of them. For example, the authors claimed Tall el-Hammam showed unique damage, unlike other cities destroyed by fires or invasion: archeologists said the features described are typical for cities built of the same materials. 

The paper also relied on assessments made by people working well outside their areas of expertise.

The funding of the project also came in for criticism, with some work allegedly funded by sources seeking to prove Biblical stories true.

Perhaps the most damaging response came from prominent science sleuth Dr Elisabeth Bik, who found suspicious repetitions in images included in the paper, indicating possible tampering. Although the authors dismissed these as trivial, unreported image manipulation is potentially far more serious than misinterpretation of data caused by inexperience.

The revelation the corresponding author had, under another name, been convicted of charging fees for water studies he was not legally able to perform didn’t add to the paper’s credibility. Other authors, however, have much more distinguished records, although sometimes in only tenuously related fields.

Some of these matters were addressed in an extensive correction published by Scientific Reports the following year, but few critics were satisfied. In 2023, Retraction Watch reported the journal had added a note that the paper was undergoing further investigations in the light of concerns about its data and the conclusions reached.

Science usually works quite slowly, sometimes painfully so, and it has taken a further two years, but Scientific Reports has now retracted the paper entirely. 

Millions of scientific papers are published every year. Even if you exclude those in predatory journals, which will publish anything and call it peer-reviewed for a fee, a lot of these turn out to be deeply flawed. 

However, this paper has attracted a particularly large amount of notoriety on social media. Just one line of criticism became a YouTube skit using #objection. Scientific Reports’ prestige as one of the flagship publications of Nature, the widespread media attention, and the number of different fields whose scientists it managed to antagonize probably all contributed to that.

An additional reason, however, is that more is at stake than just this paper. Many of the authors of the work on Tall el-Hammam were involved in a 2007 paper, also published in a leading scientific publication, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 2007 work attributes the Younger Dryas event to a larger cometary impact. The Younger Dryas was an important, and currently unexplained, period in Earth’s climate history. Shortly after the Earth had warmed enough to leave the last Ice Age behind, temperatures collapsed again. Conditions remained very cold for around 1,000 years, particularly on either side of the North Atlantic.

No equivalent to the Younger Dryas has been found during previous interglacial periods, suggesting something extraordinary happened, and a comet impact substantially larger than Tunguska, but still much smaller than the Dino-killer, fits the bill. Several follow-up papers have been published fleshing out aspects of the claim, some of which IFLScience has also covered. However, the evidence presented has faced increasing criticism from a wide range of scientists. Exposure of the flaws in the Tall el-Hammam paper will bring even more attention to potential problems in attributing other events to cometary causes.