An exploding meteor may have wiped out ancient Dead Sea communities.

Archaeologists at a site in what's now Jordan have found evidence of a cosmic calamity… (By Bruce Bower).

Preliminary evidence indicates that a low-altitude meteor explosion around 3,700 years ago destroyed cities, villages and farmland north of the Dead Sea (shown in the background above) rendering the region uninhabitable for 600 to 700 years.

A superheated blast from the skies obliterated cities and farming settlements north of the Dead Sea around 3,700 years ago, preliminary findings suggest.

Radiocarbon dating and unearthed minerals that instantly crystallized at high temperatures indicate that a massive airburst caused by a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere instantaneously destroyed civilization in a 25-kilometer-wide circular plain called Middle Ghor, said archaeologist Phillip Silvia. The event also pushed a bubbling brine of Dead Sea salts over once-fertile farm land, Silvia and his colleagues suspect.

People did not return to the region for 600 to 700 years, said Silvia, of Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque. He reported these findings at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research on November 17.

Excavations at five large Middle Ghor sites, in what’s now Jordan, indicate that all were continuously occupied for at least 2,500 years until a sudden, collective collapse toward the end of the Bronze Age. Ground surveys have located 120 additional, smaller settlements in the region that the researchers suspect were also exposed to extreme, collapse-inducing heat and wind. An estimated 40,000 to 65,000 people inhabited Middle Ghor when the cosmic calamity hit, Silvia said.

The most comprehensive evidence of destruction caused by a low-altitude meteor explosion comes from the Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam, where a team that includes Silvia has been excavating for the last 13 years. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the mud-brick walls of nearly all structures suddenly disappeared around 3,700 years ago, leaving only stone foundations.

What’s more, the outer layers of many pieces of pottery from same time period show signs of having melted into glass. Zircon crystals in those glassy coats formed within one second at extremely high temperatures, perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun, Silvia said.

High-force winds created tiny, spherical mineral grains that apparently rained down on Tall el-Hammam, he said. The research team has identified these minuscule bits of rock on pottery fragments at the site.

Examples exist of exploding space rocks that have wreaked havoc on Earth (SN: 5/13/17, p. 12). An apparent meteor blast over a sparsely populated Siberian region in 1908, known as the Tunguska event, killed no one but flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest. And a meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 injured more than 1,600 people, mainly due to broken glass from windows that were blown out.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/exploding-meteor-may-have-wiped-out-ancient-dead-sea-communities?fbclid=IwAR2cuanZ7Tc3Q4AIVWY40nqR-KU7er8H0de9nXwdKITbMKjMhcETGoEDks8 

Fears far right street gang ‘getting bolder’ in Helsinki.

The Soldiers Of Odin were filmed ‘patrolling’ a shopping centre in an area with a large immigrant population.

Image: Minna Aula / Yle.

A leading member of Helsinki’s Somali community says the Finnish far right is getting “bolder” after a so-called ‘street patrol’ in the east of the city.

City council member Abdirahim Husu Hussein (SDP) was at East Helsinki’s Puhos shopping centre on Monday night when around thirty members of the far-right organisation Soldiers Of Odin arrived.

“They’re not coming there to be friendly,” he said, “They’re provoking people with name calling and hand gestures. It’s not innocent.”

Hussein told Yle News it wasn’t the first time he’d seen far-right groups gathering in Itäkeskus.

“It’s getting bolder, it’s getting more,” he said, adding that it wasn’t only the Soldiers Of Odin group responsible for these kinds of ‘street patrols’.

Far right caught on camera.

Video filmed by a freelance Somali journalist and posted on Facebook, appears to show members of the Soldiers Of Odin and neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement in uniform, posing for photos and marching through the shopping centre.

The journalist, who gave his name as Musse, said the group patrolled the Puhos shopping centre - next to the larger Itis shopping centre - for around 45 minutes and that there was a police presence throughout.

Chief Inspector Patrik Karlsson from Helsinki Police told Yle News that two calls about the far-right group had been made to police, at around 19.30 and 19.45 on Monday night.

He told Yle News, “When the police patrol approached them they said they were just walking and sightseeing.” No further action was taken by police.

Karlsson also told Yle News he didn’t believe that the number of calls to Helsinki police about far-right groups had increased in recent years.

Over a third of Itäkeskus residents have a foreign background.

When asked if the police should have done more, council member Husu said, “The police were as professional as they should be,” but he added, “The right to walk and gather anywhere in the country is for everyone, but there are lots of places to do that without putting fear into other people’s lives.”

The far-right gathering came on the same day as the City of Helsinki published data showing that eastern Helsinki has the city’s highest number of residents with a foreign background (with 'foreign background' defined as a person with two parents who were both born abroad), with Itäkeskus among the areas seeing numbers of foreign-background residents reach over a third of the total population.

Soldiers Of Odin founder’s neo-nazi connection.

Photos confirming the event took place on Monday night have been posted on the Soldiers Of Odin’s own public Facebook page, with a caption reading “Special thanks to the resistance movement for taking part in the event,” - a reference to the fact that members of the Nordic Resistance Movement or ‘Pohjoismaisen vastarintaliikkeen’ also appear to be present.

The Nordic Resistance Movement is currently embroiled in a legal battle at the Turku Court of Appeal, attempting to overturn a ruling made last September which would ban the group on the grounds of violent conduct by its members.

Soldiers Of Odin was founded in Kemi in 2015 by neo-Nazi Mika Ranta, and began carrying out what it describes as ‘street patrols’ in the same year.

Mika Ranta is a member of the openly white supremacist Finnish Resistance Movement, or ‘SVL’, the Finnish branch of the Nordic Resistance Movement. Ranta has previously denied that there is any link between the Soldiers Of Odin street patrols and the SVL… (Yle News / Tom Bateman).

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/fears_far_right_street_gang_getting_bolder_in_helsinki/10528627