On 24 April 2025, Scientific Reports formally withdrew a 2021 article that had claimed a Tunguska-scale cosmic airburst levelled Tall el-Hammam in the southern Jordan Valley — a destruction the authors suggested could underlie the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Editors said multiple technical critiques left them “no longer confident” in the paper’s conclusions, and announced a full retraction of the study.
The retraction note cites two published commentaries: one by geologists Scott Jaret and R. Scott Harris (2022) questioning the mineralogical and geochemical evidence, and another by physicists Mark Boslough and Ari Bruno (2025) arguing that the Tall el-Hammam data were mis-interpreted through incorrect comparisons with the 1908 Tunguska explosion. Because of these issues, editors concluded that the destruction mechanism proposed in the original paper “appears to not be sufficiently supported by the data.”
The decision follows a two-year investigation first signalled by an editorial expression of concern and preceded by two author corrections (February 2022 and May 2023). Eleven of the paper’s 21 authors — including corresponding author George Howard — disagreed with the retraction, while eight co-authors did not respond; lead author Ted Bunch died in 2023.
Retraction Watch, which broke the story on 23 April 2025, noted Howard’s blog post calling the journal’s move “a profoundly disappointing and frankly disgusting turn of events.” The watchdog site also recorded that the article had generated more than 180 PubPeer comments since 2021.
Originally published on 20 September 2021, the study had argued that an intense mid-second-millennium BCE fireball devastated Tall el-Hammam, leaving a carbon-rich destruction layer, shock-melted materials and elevated salt levels that forced regional abandonment. The authors proposed that oral memories of such an event could have been written into Genesis.
Tall el-Hammam, excavated since 2005, has been one of several sites suggested as Sodom. Archaeologists and biblical historians remain divided on that identification; the retraction addresses only the cosmic-impact hypothesis, not the city’s name or the site’s destruction date.
The paper’s profile had remained high for sceptics: by the day the retraction landed it had already drawn 187 critical comments on the post‑publication forum PubPeer, far out‑stripping its scholarly citations. Physicist Mark Boslough, lead author of one of the Matters Arising critiques, welcomed the outcome, saying that “the pattern of problems revealed on PubPeer were overwhelming… their evidence simply didn’t support their conclusions.” Corresponding author Allen West countered that “a small but vocal group of scientists has actively sought to stifle discussion,” and said the team intends to republish the work “with new data” in another venue. Retraction Watch Observers such as Boslough predict the episode will now spur closer scrutiny of the Comet Research Group’s other impact‑related claims, several of which have faced comparable questions over data transparency and methodology.
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