Publication Announcement

Dr. Phil Silvia, Director of Scientific Analysis for the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (TeHEP), announces the publication of a major paper in Nature Scientific Reports entitled: “A Tunguska sized Airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea.”

This massive paper, written by over 20 contributing authors in addition to Dr. Silvia, provides detailed forensic evidence that a cosmic airburst obliterated Tall el-Hammam, the largest city in the Dead Sea area during the time of Abraham, ca. 1700 BC.

Trinity Southwest University (TSU) has been excavating Tall el-Hammam for 15 consecutive seasons. During the early seasons of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Ptoject (TeHEP), his team discovered an anomalous “burn layer” just below the modern surface of the artifact-filled, half-mile long cultural mound and suspected it might provide hard evidence of the destruction event. In 2012, Dr. Silvia (then still a doctoral candidate and student at TSU) joined the team specifically to investigate the destruction evidence.

In 2014, the Comet Research Group (CRG) research team was invited to assist in the examination of material evidence from within the destruction layer. The CRG has authored more than 40 major journal publications defining another cosmic catastrophe at the close of the last ice age 13,000 years ago, the so-called Younger Dryas Impact. They also developed most of the protocols necessary to conduct this investigation.

Dr. Steven Collins, Director of the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project, observed: “We had the archeological history of the site well defined after so many field seasons, but a far different set of skills was needed to make a proper investigation of the burn layer for impact signatures.” The CRG had the technical and forensic ability to analyze the material evidence. Dr. Silvia's post-doc research project, funded through Experiment.com, was entitled “Fire from the Sky.”

The preliminary hypothesis of destruction from the sky turned out to be supported by numerous lines of geochemical and material evidence buried not far below the surface of the hill. A carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contained peak concentrations of shocked quartz; melted pottery and mud bricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; iron- and silicon-rich spherules; spherules from melted plaster and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures instantly exceeded 2000 °C at a time described in the bible. How hot is that? Enough to turn an automobile into a molten pool of iron!

Dr. Allen West of the CRG says of the findings, “Among more technical evidence, we discovered human bones that had been splattered by molten glass from the event. The glass is indistinguishable from that found at ground zero after atomic explosions. These people were killed by the heat and pressure of an atomic-like explosion but without the radiation.”

Contributors to this effort described working on this research project and writing this paper as a “once-in-a-career opportunity.”

The paper is available for free download from Nature Scientific Reports by this link: www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3