Emeritus Professor Jim Kennett Featured in The Current

Kennett and collaborators were featured in UCSB's The Current about their paper published in the ScienceOpen journal Airbursts and Cratering Impacts, have for the first time hydrocode modeled  “touchdown” cosmic airbursts — when an impactor explodes above ground with sufficient energy to reach the Earth’s surface as heat and shockwaves, a process more common and potentially more dangerous than large crater-forming impact events. In a second paper in the same journal these authors set their model onto Tall el-Hammam, the site of a Bronze Age city near the Dead Sea of  great interest to archaeologists and biblical scholars because of cultural evidence dating back thousands of years. This modeling bolsters the case that an airburst blast wave demolished the whole city, along with a three-story palace, and formed a destruction layer containing impact debris.