Evidence of agricultural activity doesn’t return to the landscape for at least 600 years. The blast also may have stripped away once-fertile soils and coated agricultural lands with superheated brine ejected from the Dead Sea.
Their research was presented in 2017 at an annual meeting of The Meteoritical Society.Īrchaeologists say the explosion instantly devastated hundreds of square miles north of the Dead Sea, destroying 100 percent of nearby cities and towns. And when the blast occurred, it caused massive devastation, according to a group of Christian scientists who’ve studied the site for more than a decade. Located in what is now Jordan, some scientists believe Tall el-Hammam was the biblical city of Sodom. Roughly 3,700 years ago, a meteor may have exploded over the Dead Sea city of Tall el-Hammam. Here, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most compelling and captivating accounts.Īround 1700 B.C.: meteor explosion may have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah If these documents accurately portray meteor fireballs, then somewhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of people have been killed by falling space rocks. Yet their presence in official histories and similarities to modern accounts lead some scientists to believe at least some of the events must have really occurred.Ĭhinese histories in particular are rich with accounts from government scholars and astronomers that document times when “a star fell.” These records were kept consistently across many provinces and passed from dynasty to dynasty, chronicling significant events spanning thousands of years. In most cases, there’s no physical evidence to confirm these stories. Researchers mining ancient texts in recent decades have discovered that historical records are surprisingly rich with accounts of apparent deaths due to falling space rocks. However, if ancient scholars can be trusted, humans haven’t always been so lucky. Yet there are no reports of injuries from Poland on that day. If someone flew over a populated area, dropping hundreds of thousands of stones from the sky, you might expect at least one person to get hurt. “The citizens of Warsaw gazed, petrified with fear, on the rapid approach of an immense ball of fire, which burst over their heads with a noise and shock such as never before had been seen or heard on the surface of the Earth,” mineral expert Lewis Feuchtfanger reported at a scientific conference in 1868. It’s the largest meteorite fall on record. The biggest recovered meteorite (a fragment of a space rock that makes it to the ground) weighed 20 pounds (9 kilograms). 30, 1868, a meteor exploded outside a town called Pultusk, near Warsaw, Poland, creating a literal meteor shower: More than 100,000 stones fell from the sky. One of the most recent and well-known examples occurred in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, when a house-sized asteroid exploded over the city and injured some 1,200 people. On many occasions, space rocks have exploded over populated areas and sent thousands of meteorites raining down. But that’s not to say we haven’t come close. However, researchers still have not found a single confirmed case of death by space rock. “It’s only been in the last half century or so that we’ve even realized that such a thing could happen.” “I do strongly suspect that stats on ‘death by asteroid’ have been severely undercounted through human history,” NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson told Astronomy via email. And with those odds, you’d expect people to get killed by meteorites fairly often. Based purely on statistics, researchers estimate that a space rock should strike a human roughly once every nine years.
But every once in a while, these objects actually strike humans and our property. Our planet is vast, so meteorites typically don’t concern us. Every day, shooting stars fail to recognize a boundary between space and Earth, dropping rocks from above - and often with dramatic results. Instead, stars and galaxies are scattered through the cosmos at distances so great they’re incomprehensible to us.īut not all celestial phenomena exist so far away. The truth, of course, is that no such sphere exists.
To us, the stars appear fixed on a so-called celestial sphere that encapsulates our entire earthly existence. When we stargaze, we bask in photons that have traveled for many millennia before reaching our eyes.
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