The Middle Ghor region north of the Dead Sea was destroyed by a powerful asteroid 3,700 years ago, archeologists said last Saturday at a conference in Denver, Colorado.
The region contains the Middle Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam, believed by some researchers to be the plausible site of the biblical city of Sodom, which, according to the Christian Bible, was destroyed by God because its residents lived a life of sin.
"The Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven," it reads in the Book of Genesis.
"And He destroyed these cities, and all the country about, and all the inhabitants of the cities and all things that spring from the Earth."
Scientists found evidence a superheated blast obliterated a 25-kilometer-wide circular plain in the region and the 40,000 to 65,000 people who lived in it, leaving the area uninhabited for at least 600 years.
The event also stripped "agricultural soils from once-fertile fields" and covered the "eastern Middle Ghor with a super-heated brine of Dead Sea anhydride salts pushed over the landscape by the Event's frontal shockwaves."
Archeologists have been excavating the city of Tall el-Hammam for the past 13 years and say minerals suddenly crystallized in blistering heat support their concept.
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