That airburst caused rock to melt and they calculate that it required a temperature of ,8000-12,000 C for a few milliseconds.
When I was growing up, intelligent, well informed scholars thought Sodom was a stupid mythological just so story. From my blog:
“During the last semester of my senior year in undergrad, I had to take 13 hours to graduate. I was taking some really rough physics courses as part of my degree that semester which required taking most of the Master’s level courses, just so my degree would read, Bachelors of Science in Physics rather than just Bachelors of Science. Stupidly I had thought that would make a difference to someone. I needed a pud course. I took a easy humanities requirement, Old Testament Survey. This was at Oklahoma University, so it wasn’t like we had someone who believed any of the stuff in the Bible teaching the course. I remember well, how the professor ridiculed and mocked the story of Lot’s wife as a just-so story, a story to explain the natural occurrence of salt in the Dead Sea area. Being a new Christian at the time, I didn’t like the way the prof ridiculed everything in the Bible but I had no answer to how Sodom happened.” The Migrant Mind: Pillar of Salt: Is it Real?
That temperature, the pressure wave in the dead sea provides a perfectly sound scientific answer for the Lot’s wife story.
The problem is we still have 'well informed, intelligent" (WII) scholars who won’t accept that story as real–although are likely getting fewer in number.
Here is the problem. These WII scholars know the Bible is false and that is their starting point. Even while knowing of the statue of a Semitic man in a multicolored cloak, found in a pyramidal grave with 11 other Semitic graves in the back yard of a Palace with two rows of 12 pillars, at Avaris by Manfred Bietak in 1986, scholars have remained in denial that this could be Joseph’s palace. Such ignoring of the data in favor of a view that makes the Bible wrong amazes me. Unwilling to make a correction and say that the Ramses theory of the exodus is wrong, they cling to the idea that it is the Bible that is wrong. And if one places the Exodus at Ramses time, then there is no evidence of the exodus. Moving it back 200 years to fit the time of this palace, suddenly there is all sorts of evidence for the exodus including the fall of the walls of Jericho.
If Sodom and the Exodus can be true, why not some of the other stuff, like the Flood? I have shown here a flood (not at the time people prefer), which matches exactly the biblical description. Lasted around a year, covered high mountains,caused massive rains, destroyed the land (and it is still destroyed–it wasn’t destroyed and then recovered). But even showing that this story of the Bible could be true doesn’t move anyone. People prefer to have a mythological Bible. That is my take on the state of affairs. I don’t care what the justification is for wanting a mythological bible, it is still yielding to the concept that the Bible is false rather than looking for a way for it to be actually true… My most favorite reason is below because it is so weak
The bible wasn’t meant to teach us history. That certainly was the attitude of my 1972 OT survey teacher and at that time there was no evidence of the events of Sodom–it was mythology. Besides, no one ever tells my where or who they received the information that the Bible was not meant to teach us anything about nature/history or have any science content. It is as if these people have received a divine revelation from God which revealed his intentions to them but they don’t want to say it.
Some say there isn’t any ‘secret’ information in the Bible. Thus God would not have inspired a writer with such knowledge that they couldn’t have known at the time. Really? Isn’t prophecy of Jesus’ advent ‘secret’ knowledge to the Jews? Again, who told them that God would not engage in this behavior of revealing information early? What about the fact that the description of Eden in Gen 2:8-14 exactly describes the geography of the world at the only time in earth history those four rivers could have interacted. It is geological fact that they did interact on the Mediterranean floor long ago. Is this blind coincidence, an example of us monkey’s typing gibberish long enough we finally get something right? Or is this a case of that secret knowledge everyone knows can’t exist?
Edited to add. The Bible says Havilah was located in Arabia: 1 sam 15:7 Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt. The last time Arabia was tilted so as to allow the waters to drain off into the Mediterranean was about 5 myr ago. Thus, Havilah is a real key to understanding when Eden occurred. From the Oligocene until the earliest Pliocene, Arabia drained a big river into the Med. After that time, the land tilted to where it drains into the Indian Ocean.
Is it coincidence that this Edenic site is situated in a deep basin which is the only place that geologically/scientifically can match the strange hydrology described in Genesis 2?
And is it further coincidence that this Edenic site is the only place on earth that experienced a flood matching the Biblical description of Noah’s Flood? The biggest problem for any of the candidates for the flood is that none of them can last a year and none of them can cover high mountains in a local setting. The Messinian flood can do that.
At least with Sodom it has now moved from mythological to real history during my life time. I have provided a pathway for all the other earlier Biblical stories to become real as well. Maybe it is peer pressure that keeps people from accepting new ideas. Even as adults we will look at our neighbor and go “Are you buying this nonsene?”. One doesn’t ask such a question unless one is at least tempted. If one isn’t tempted one says, 'this is nonsense".
Believing the Bible tells us real history is as out of fashion every bit as much as top hats, and hooped skirts. Our scientific colleagues look down on us if we support the reality of the Bible. No doubt a few of my former colleagues when they find out what I am now up to will think I have gone barking mad. But are we seeking the favor of men or of God?(Galatians 1) I can tell you from my terminal cancer perspective, almost all of what I did previously in my life isn’t of much value spiritually. It won’t matter a whit to God. What will matter is what we did to make God acceptable to our world. Telling everyone that story after story in what is called God’s Word, is myth, allegory, or Neolithic nonsense, does not make our God more acceptable to our world.
Sadly, Christianity is so used to losing the intellectual battles we have fought over the past 2 centuries that we have surrendered to the biblical criticism (most of which came from Atheists) and accepted their assumptions as necessary. The Bible is true history, or at least there is a way it can be true history if only we would not worry about what our colleagues thought about us.