Evidence shows that a devastating barrage of meteorites rained down on the Dead Sea city of Tall el Hammam in present-day Jordan. And according to some researchers who believe Tall el Hammam is the Biblical city of Sodom, that scenario could explain its destruction. Credit: John Martin/Wikimedia Commons.
Editor's note: This article was first published and updated in 2020.
When we look at the starry sky, photons take thousands of years to reach our eyes. To us, the stars appear fixed on the so-called celestial sphere, which encompasses our entire terrestrial existence.
The truth, of course, is that no such sphere exists. Instead, stars and galaxies are scattered across the universe, far beyond our understanding.
However, not all celestial phenomena exist at such a distance. Every day, shooting stars fail to recognize the boundary between space and Earth, dropping stones from above, often with dramatic results.
Our Earth is so vast that meteorites usually don't concern us. But sometimes these objects actually attack humans and our property.
“We strongly suspect that the 'asteroid death' statistics have been grossly underestimated throughout human history,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer. astronomy on mail. “It's only in the last half-century or so that we've realized that something like that can happen.”
However, researchers have yet to find a single death caused by space rocks. But that doesn't mean we aren't close to it yet. Modern history is full of near misses. Space rocks often explode in populated areas, raining down thousands of meteorites.
One recent and well-known example occurred in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, when an asteroid the size of a house exploded over the city, injuring around 1,200 people. Even further back in time, on January 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. The largest meteorite recovered – a piece of space rock that falls to Earth – weighed 20 pounds (9 kilograms). This is the largest meteorite fall in recorded history.
“The inhabitants of Warsaw watched in horror as a huge fireball rapidly approached. ” expert Louis Feuchfanger reported at a scientific congress in 1868. If someone were to fly over a populated area and drop hundreds of thousands of rocks from the sky, one might expect at least one person to be injured. However, there were no reports of injuries from Poland that day.
But if ancient scholars are to be believed, humans weren't always so lucky. In recent decades, researchers excavating ancient texts have discovered that the historical record is surprisingly rich in accounts of apparent deaths from falling cosmic rocks. In most cases, there is no physical evidence to support these stories. However, their presence in official history and similarities with modern accounts lead some scientists to believe that at least some of the events must have actually happened.
Chinese history, in particular, is rich with accounts by government scholars and astronomers who recorded times when “the stars fell.” These records were kept consistently across many states, passed down from dynasty to dynasty, and recorded important events over thousands of years. If these documents accurately describe meteor fireballs, then hundreds to tens of thousands of people were killed by falling rocks from space.
Here we have compiled a list of some of the most attractive accounts.
Around 1700 BC: Sodom and Gomorrah may have been destroyed by a meteorite explosion.
About 3,700 years ago, a meteorite may have exploded over the Dead Sea city of Tor el Hammam. Some scientists believe that Tall el Hammam, located in present-day Jordan, was the Biblical city of Sodom. And when the explosion occurred, it caused massive destruction, according to a group of Christian Scientists who have been studying the site for more than a decade. Their research was presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting. meteorite society.
Archaeologists say the explosion instantly destroyed hundreds of square miles north of the Dead Sea, destroying 100 percent of nearby cities and towns. It's also possible that the explosion stripped away once fertile soil and flooded farmland with superheated salt water spewed from the Dead Sea. No trace of agricultural activity will return to the landscape for at least 600 years.
In its heyday, it was a thriving metropolis with huge walls, but a dramatic event caused all of its structures to appear to have collapsed. The researchers found various clues about what happened at Tall el Hammam, including pottery shards and rocks that were momentarily heated to more than 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit (7,760 degrees Celsius). It has said.
In the past, scientists have suggested that Tall el Hammam was destroyed by an earthquake or a petrochemical fire, but those scenarios do not suggest high heat, a huge amount of ash, or a complete explanation of why the structure collapsed all in one direction. cannot be explained. Only an exploding space rock could cause this kind of instantaneous pulse of heat.
If it really was an airstrike, the effect would be like launching an atomic bomb on an ancient city, possibly killing vast numbers of people and potentially rendering it unsustainable for centuries. there is. And perhaps that scenario could explain the destruction of the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
January 14, 616 AD: Wall collapses, killing 10 rebels.
According to ancient Chinese official records, in January 616, a large “shooting star” fell on rebel Lu Mingyue's camp, killing 10 people. An account of this event was recorded in the Book of Sui, a history of the Sui dynasty commissioned by the emperor and compiled by prominent scholars of the time.
According to the document, this shooting star knocked out a wall-attacking tower, or siege tower, killing 10 people. Scientists who investigated this account in 1994 suggested that a meteorite would need to be relatively large, weighing tens or even hundreds of pounds, to cause this type of damage.
The official account and description of the fireball lend credence to this story. However, the team also suggests that the incident may have been related to a military operation. If so, the stories we have left behind are just another form of ancient propaganda.
Around 1341: “Iron rain” falls in Yunnan province, killing people and animals.
A series of vivid descriptions found in ancient Chinese historical documents record an “iron rain” that fell in Yunnan province some 700 years ago. This account gives various dates from 1321 to 1361, probably as a result of copying errors in recent centuries. However, researchers who have studied the early documents, before they were transcribed into modern times, have found that everyone agrees that the document dates to 1341.
Accounts of what happened come from cities and towns spread across hundreds of square miles in Yunnan province. There are similar passages in local history, suggesting that many eyewitness accounts all describe the same dramatic event. The fact that the fireball was observed over such a vast area means that it must have been a very large meteorite to begin with.
According to the report, “all the houses and hilltops had holes in them” as a result of the iron rain. Astronomers believe these word choices are similar to descriptions of more recent iron meteorite falls, where fragments of the parent body left small craters across the landscape. The documents also describe damaged crops and half-ruined homes. History books do not give the exact number of people who are said to have died from the meteorite's direct hit, but instead state that “most of the people and animals that were directly hit by the meteorite died.”
April 4, 1490: 10,000 people died in Qingyang, China.
According to numerous Chinese historical records kept by the central and local governments and other sources, on April 4, 1490, an event possibly caused by an asteroid explosion killed 10,000 to several people. Millions died. Qingyang City (or Qingyang).
It's an incredibly horrifying story, but some of the specifics match other well-documented events in more recent history. Records show that the stones were all different sizes, with some being the size of a goose egg and weighing about 3 pounds. Others were as small as water chestnuts.
The size of the meteorite in this small area makes it seem unlikely that a crash that would have killed so many people would have been expected to result in a larger stone. But some astronomers wonder if these accounts describe the Tunguska-type atmospheric explosion that devastated the city.
Whatever the cause, reports say all surviving residents of Qingyang City were evacuated in the aftermath.
By a strange coincidence, astronomers from China, Japan, and Korea also discovered a bright comet in 1490. This comet was seen breaking up in the night sky a century after his arrival. Astronomers now know that this comet's debris produced the annual Oblongid meteor shower and the near-Earth asteroid 2003 EH1. Although there is no evidence that the meteorite deaths were related, it is clear that Asian astronomers of the time were well aware of celestial events.
1648: Two sailors died on the Dutch ship Malacca.
According to Captain Olof E. Willman, in 1648, two sailors were killed when a large rock fell from the sky and onto the deck of a ship at sea. Almost twenty years later, the captain wrote down a record of this event, which was eventually published by Alexander von in his Humboldt book Cosmos.
Willman claimed that an 8-pound stone fell from the sky while their ship, the Malacca, was navigating the famous spice trade route between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies. Two of his subordinates were injured and died from the impact.
Historians consider Willman's account reliable, but in 1994 Swedish scientists showed that there were also at least 20 dangerous active volcanoes along the route. Therefore, it is possible that one of them set off a “volcanic bomb” and attacked the ship.
August 10, 1888: Ottoman records suggest death by meteorite
On the night of August 10, 1888, at about 8:30 p.m., a bright fireball passed through Iraqi villages leaving a trail of smoke, before exploding and raining stones down a “pyramid-shaped” hill. As a result, one man who lived in the area died and another was paralyzed.
Researchers discovered this historical account in the digitized official records of the former Ottoman Empire. They published their findings in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science in 2020.
Ozan Unsaran, a planetary scientist at Turkey's Ege University, worked with his team to search for keywords such as “meteorite,” “fireball,” and “rock from the sky.” They found 10 documents of his that matched their search. Three of his cases were related to his one fireball event. They also found evidence of several more large meteorite explosions in the Ottoman Empire's centuries-old record.
The document says rocks from the impact have been returned to the central government, but so far researchers have not been able to find any stones in museums or archives.
However, based on historical accounts, it seems that death from above is nothing new.
