which atom has the largest atomic radius

The resulting Dead Sea Rift is a highly active pull-apart strike-slip fault with largely horizontal left lateral motion.

The Middle Ghor is marked by a major tectonic boundary separating the Arabian and African Plates (Sinai-Palestinian subplate) running through the Gulf of Aqaba/Dead Sea/Jordan Valley region. At the very least, the nature of the MB II destruction matrix is highly unusual and atypical of archaeological strata throughout the ancient Near East 3. Sherds from thousands of different pottery vessels were randomly intermixed and distributed throughout the depth of the matrix along with mudbrick fragments, objects of daily life, carbonized pieces of wooden beams, charred grain, bones, and limestone cobbles burned to a chalk-like consistency. The ~ 1.5-m-thick MB II destruction matrix also exhibited rare properties not found in the strata above or below it. These suggest that the city’s destruction was associated with some unknown high-temperature event.

In addition to the usual debris patterns typical of ancient cities destroyed by warfare and earthquakes, the excavations of the final phase of the MB II stratum revealed highly unusual materials: pottery sherds with outer surfaces melted into glass, some bubbled as if ‘boiled’ melted and ‘bubbled’ mudbrick fragments partially-melted roofing clay (with wattle impressions) and melted building plaster. The extensive, ongoing excavations at TeH have continued for fifteen consecutive seasons since 2006, involving principal investigators assisted by graduate and doctoral students and large numbers of volunteers from across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Near East 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The project is under the aegis of the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University, Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, NM, under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. All dates and ages reported here are as BCE, “Before Common Era,” and occasionally in calendar years before the year 1950 (cal BP).

For archaeological periods and date ranges for the Jordan Valley, see Supporting Information, Text S1. This investigation focuses on the Middle Bronze Age II (MB II) from ~ 1800–1550 BCE. More than just a mere city, TeH comprised the urban core of a city-state that flourished nonstop for ~ 3000 years during the Chalcolithic Period and Bronze Age beginning ~ 4700 BCE until it was destroyed at ~ 1650 BCE (3600 cal BP). The site contains the stratified remains of a fortified urban center, now known as the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant 1. A mound of ancient ruins is referred to as “tel” in Hebrew and “tell” or “tall” in Arabic. TeH is a raised, two-tiered occupational mound, the largest in the Jordan Valley. Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 ☌. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa) melted pottery and mudbricks diamond-like carbon soot Fe- and Si-rich spherules CaCO 3 spherules from melted plaster and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea.

Which atom has the largest atomic radius