Millions of scientific papers are submitted to various journals and other publications each year. One of the main reasons for submitting a paper to these journals is to have it reviewed by other experts in a given field to see if your ideas are correct.

Most of the time, papers are largely ignored by most of the world and only looked at by people who happen to be directly involved in that field of study. Sometimes, however, a paper will catch the attention of news agencies and spread like wildfire. That is what happened when a paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2021.

The paper looked at an event that took place around the year 1600 BCE, which leveled the city of Tall el-Hammam, which is located in the Jordan Valley. It was suggested that this could have been caused by a meteorite or a part of an asteroid that exploded in the air, similar to what happened at the Tunguska event.

The Tunguska event occurred in 1908, and the explosion destroyed thousands of trees and injured 1500 people. It would have been much worse, but Tunguska is in Siberia, one of the least populated areas of the world.

This paper caught so much attention because the authors claimed that the same thing happened over the city of Tall el-Hammam, and given what the impact would have looked like, this city may have inspired the biblical story of Sodom & Gomorrah. The timeline lines up pretty well, as does the location, more or less.

Anytime the news can link a scientific report to a biblical story, they know that it is going to get a lot of clicks, so they took it and ran with it.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the paper was very poorly done and had lots of issues. Relatively quickly after it was published, experts in several different fields published criticisms of the paper.

For starters, the paper was apparently funded by a group that sought out evidence showing that Biblical stories are true. So, the authors had an incentive to come to the conclusions that they did. Another issue is that they had experts from one field of study commenting on areas well outside their expertise and using those comments to support their arguments.

While it has taken several years, Scientific Reports has now formally retracted this paper entirely. When this happens, it is generally seen as an acknowledgment that the paper was deeply flawed in some way and no longer worthy of the attention that remaining in a journal would give it.

This is an excellent reminder of the fact that news outlets publishing science-related stories often don’t do the necessary legwork to determine what is true and what is false. Instead, they just talk about whatever they think will get them the most attention.

You can bet that most of the thousands of publications that wrote about this study when it first came out won’t be so quick to publish about its retraction.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about 50 amazing finds on Google Earth.