Bergsma also told the outlet about the unique grotesque condition of the human remains at the dig site.
“Human skeletons are complete up until about halfway up the backbone, and then there's just a scorch mark, and there's nothing on the top of the body,” he described. “They found massive evidence that a huge heat blast from the sky at about 25C above the horizon incinerated these twin cities on the Jordanian side of the river.”
Destructive Force Several Times Larger Than Siberian Explosion
Steven Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, and the lead archaeologist at Tall el-Hammam has theorized the airburst over the city might have been even larger than the Tunguska Event of 1908, an asteroid explosion over remote Siberia that caused massive destruction, according to Relevant. It would have expended even more energy than when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in August of 1945.
According to NASA, on June 30, 1908, an asteroid plunged into Earth's atmosphere and exploded in the skies over Siberia. Local eyewitnesses in the sparsely populated region reported seeing a fireball and hearing a large explosion. They also reported massive forest fires, and trees blown over for miles. Because of the remoteness of the site, the event garnered little attention. The first scientific expedition did not reach the area until 1927, but still found ample evidence of the asteroid's destruction caused by the shock wave and heat blast from the aerial explosion.
As CBN News has reported, Collins co-authored a paper that confirmed the city was destroyed by a “thermal event.”
“The violent conflagration that ended occupation at Tall el-Hammam produced melted pottery, scorched foundation stones, and several feet of ash and destruction debris churned into a dark gray matrix as if in a Cuisinart,” he noted.
In another co-authored paper, archaeologists Phillip J. Silvia and Collins wrote, “The physical evidence from Tall el-Hammam and neighboring sites exhibit signs of a highly destructive concussive and thermal event that one might expect from what is described in Genesis 19.”
In that paper, they concluded that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by a meteoritic airburst.
A paper originally published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports in 2021, but updated this past May, backs up Collins' theory that the event over the ancient city was “much larger in force than the Tunguska event.”
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a measured 15 kilotons of energy, the blast equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. The damage at Tunguska was measured at 5 megatons or 5 million tons of TNT, according to the paper.
Using a supercomputer to analyze the data at the site, the paper's authors have suggested the destructive force at Tall el-Hammam was at least in the 15-megaton range, having a blast equivalent of 15 million tons of TNT.
Genesis 19:27-28 describes the aftermath in the valley.
“Early the next morning Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.”
Impact Generated Large Amounts of Salt, A Historical Event
The high-energy airburst also appears to have generated large amounts of salt that hearkens back to the Genesis 19 account of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, Relevant reported.
“As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, 'Flee for your lives! Don't look back, and don't stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!'”