That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps
It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
It came in fast and in a flat angle from somewhere up in the Arctic, over what is now the North Sea, over what is now Germany, and smashed into/grazed the northern side of what is now the 'Gamskogel' near 'Köfels' in the Alps in Austria. The resulting cloud of glowing white hot stuff got almost ejected back into space, and mostly stayed on course North->South by inertia, sending it over the Adriatic Sea, radiating heat downwards in the process. Some of it impacted in the Levante in multiple places, some far apart, over several hours.
We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.
The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:
“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”
The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:
“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”
Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).
>> “[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”
I'm pretty sure clay tables, that had to be fired to preserve them, did not function as "notebooks". Scribes probably used either unbaked clay or wax tablets to take notes, and they would erase and overwrite them constantly like etch-a-sketch.
I bought the book "A SUMERIAN OBSERVATION OF THE KÖFELS’ IMPACT EVENT" by Mark Hempsell, and Alan Bond. Tried to do a film adaptation, about 10 years ago.
One part in Sumer and another in the Alps.
"This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The incoming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometers from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it traveled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometers in diameter"
This doesn't even make any sense. A 1km asteroid going many kilometers a second entered at a six degree angle, tore through hundreds of miles of atmosphere without burning up or breaking up, hit a mountain causing a landslide and only then turned into a 5km fireball and traveled down the valley (at a height of ~1500 meters above the valley floor) and just sort of evaporated?
I don't think physics works the way the author of this piece thinks physics works.
Sumerian and Akkadian are two different languages. This tablet is written in Akkadian and is dated in the Akkadian era. The authors claim is that the tablet is a [translated] copy of a much (much) older Sumerian tablet. Apparently the author's theory is not taken seriously by assyriologists or ancient science historians.
How does one reliably carbon-date a site which got much extraterrestrial matter mixed into it? Whith probably different carbonisotope decay rate onsets/offsets? Because from 'not around here'?
This article makes wildly erroneous claims about a genuinely very interesting ancient object. I've worked a bit on this (PhD in Babylonian Astronomy/Astrology) and published articles talking about it. It's a fascinating object but more so as a product of scholarly thinking about the heavens rather than actual observations. Even if it did record observations they would date to the Neo-Assyrian period (when/where the object was found) not to an even more ancient past.
Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] threadIt's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
It came in fast and in a flat angle from somewhere up in the Arctic, over what is now the North Sea, over what is now Germany, and smashed into/grazed the northern side of what is now the 'Gamskogel' near 'Köfels' in the Alps in Austria. The resulting cloud of glowing white hot stuff got almost ejected back into space, and mostly stayed on course North->South by inertia, sending it over the Adriatic Sea, radiating heat downwards in the process. Some of it impacted in the Levante in multiple places, some far apart, over several hours.
Skyfall!1!!
http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...
vibe theorising
“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”
But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.
For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...
Update:
The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:
“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”
The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:
“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”
Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).
I'm pretty sure clay tables, that had to be fired to preserve them, did not function as "notebooks". Scribes probably used either unbaked clay or wax tablets to take notes, and they would erase and overwrite them constantly like etch-a-sketch.
This doesn't even make any sense. A 1km asteroid going many kilometers a second entered at a six degree angle, tore through hundreds of miles of atmosphere without burning up or breaking up, hit a mountain causing a landslide and only then turned into a 5km fireball and traveled down the valley (at a height of ~1500 meters above the valley floor) and just sort of evaporated?
I don't think physics works the way the author of this piece thinks physics works.
I don't know enough about the event to figure out the likelihood of either hypothesis, but this other data point is something to keep in mind.
Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.