It seems the meteor explosion over the Dead Sea has caught up with mainstream – see https://phys.org/print463220038.html … which begins by telling us the South West Trinity team have been excavating at Tall el-Hammam for the last 13 years (and will be back there again in the new year). The civilisation on the Middle Ghor (or Kikkar Plain) had lasted all of 2500 years and was prosperous in the MB era. It had a perimeter wall a 100 feet thick, and 50 feet high – a quite formidable defensive barrier. It had multiple gates, and towers, and all were obliterated in an airburst event. It produced an extremely hot blast wave that wiped out all settlements in the immediate vicinity. The area remained uninhabited for 700 years in the aftermath. Silvia and Collins (in the paper) said the shock wave was directional. An earthquake would not have caused a directional blast – although from a mainstream perspective, they may still prefer an tectonic explanation rather than a cosmic one. In addition, there are no tumbled piles of mudbrick, as in an earthquake, and the fate of the mudbrick suggests an extreme heat event. According to Silvia and Collins pottery sherds also display evidence of melt (from the blast wave). For example, a melt rock was found to be a conglomerate of 3 different rocks melted together by extreme head and covered by a layer of glass, and it contained zirconion crystals. In addition, there was a layer of salt and sulfate within the ash layer (and in the soil above and below the ash). The origin of the salt was the Dead Sea, it is surmised. The salt and sulfate made the soil in the Middle Ghor unsuitable for agriculture for a long period afterwards.
However, on the end of the piece we are told some scholars are fighting back and say the geography does not fit into an identification with Sodom. Mainstream archaeologists therefore have adopted the same tactic as revisionists in holding firm to a southern Dead Sea location for Sodom, a rather peculiar situation (or the David Rohl location west of the Dead Sea). From a revisionist angle an EB age demise of Sodom would seem preferable – but it seems scholars have actually challenged a late MB date as well (not in the orthodox timeline). A lot of this must revolve around how reliable Biblical numbers might be as a good case could be made for a destruction coinciding with the migration of the Hyksos into Egypt. Orthodox chronology has MB destruction levels coinciding with the campaign of Thutmose III, a view that takes no account of earthquake phenomena (or any other kind of natural disaster). We can expect lots of people to initially reject the link to Sodom, if for no other reason it upsets their pet ideas (or ideas they had grown accustomed to accepting). A rethink by a lot of people is on the cards so the later responses to the findings will be ever more interesting.