"Of all the catastrophes in history one stands out." "The Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah." "ln a storm of fire and brimstone," "God destroyed whole cities to punish man's wickedness." "Could this terrible legend be based on a real apocalypse?" "Out of this dark landscape a mythical tale of divine wrath is grown." "The terrifying story of Sodom and Gomorrah is set somewhere in the vicinity of the Dead Sea." "It's an extraordinary place." "One of the natural wonders of the world." "At the heart of the ancient land of Palestine the Dead Sea separates Israel and Jordan in the Middle East." "According to the Book of Genesis," "Sodom and Gomorrah were two of the cities of the plain." "The men of Sodom, it's written, were wicked." "Such sinners against the Lord, he decided to destroy them." "God allowed Lot,the one good man living there, to flee with his family." "But Lot's wife disobeyed the warning not to look back and was turned into a pillar of salt." "The Lord rained down fire and brimstone." "He destroyed everyone living there and everything growing in the ground." "Lot and his daughters were the only people to survive the apocalypse." "Could a story so fantastic be grounded in truth?" "This man is convinced it is." "Graham Harris spent a decade working as a geological engineer in the Dead Sea Valley, patiently collecting data on the natural environment." "ln retirement, he delved deeper into the archaeology of the region and began to see connections between the historical record and the Old Testament legend." "To me, it is fascinating in that it describes in glowing detail, in a very short space in the Bible, a disaster." "We've puzzled for a long time over the scale and the enormity of this disaster, but, in short, Sodom and Gomorrah were there, and then they were gone." "And we've been puzzling ever since over the last 4,000 years exactly what happened to them." "With the few scattered clues in the Book of Genesis as his starting point," "Graham has looked at the scientific knowledge of the region." "He believes he's pieced together a picture of a real disaster that befell a real place." "This is a seismically active area;" "earthquakes are well known." "We have several minor earthquakes every year." "But this would it would have been a very massive earthquake that would have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and if they had been built on unstable ground and the earthquake had resulted in a massive landslide, that would account," "I feel, for the total destruction of the cities." "It's a bold theory, that a landslide following an earthquake, so decimated thriving cities that, to this day, nothing at all remains." "Only the sparse ruins of other settlements in the area hint at what the long-lost Sodom and Gomorrah may once have looked like." "Graham is convinced he's right." "But to most scientists his theory is guesswork." "If he's to convince them he has a lot to prove, that cities like these did exist in the Dead Sea Valley, that an earthquake could have struck them, and that it could have triggered a catastrophic landslide." "Even if each piece of the puzzle is plausible, can Graham fit them together to show that the Old Testament apocalypse might really have happened?" "His homespun theory is about to send a team of scientists on a journey of investigation that will end in this high security lab at Cambridge University, with a dramatic experiment to reconstruct the 4,000 year old calamity." "The journey starts with two leading scientists so intrigued by Graham's theory they want to see if it stands up to scrutiny." "Jonathan Tubb from the British Museum specialises in the archaeology of the Bible lands." "Professor Lynn Frostick is drawn to the extraordinary geology of the Dead Sea area." "Both suspect Graham's theory might be plausible." "But they need facts to support their hunch." "I don't believe that we're just chasing a fairytale with Sodom and Gomorrah." "And what I'm interested in finding is the geological explanation for the catastrophe, if you like, which brought these cities to an end in such a dramatic way that they're actually written down 2,000 years later." "Yes." "The folk memory." "The folk memory, that's what I'm after." "What sort of hardline sort of facts are you going or would you go after to be able to nail this thing down?" "What we need to do is to look for evidence of seismic activity during the period of time when Sodom and Gomorrah might have been there and might have been destroyed." "And the second thing we need to do is to look for evidence of unstable ground, ground which could be shaken and become unstable as it was shaken." "So there are really two lines of evidence that we need to look at." "Lynn will seek out fellow earth scientists to explore whether the geological record fits Graham's theory." "Jonathan is going to delve into the archaeological evidence to see what light it sheds on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah." "Jonathan has worked on digs in the Holy Land for over 30 years." "He's a world expert on the people who lived during the time of Genesis the Canaanites." "His research has convinced him that many Old Testament stories are inspired by actual events." "Genesis, like the other early books of the Bible was, in my opinion written many years, thousands of years after the events depicted." "The stories weren't created out of the blue." "ln many cases they used folk stories, folk traditions which were based on real events." "For example, folk memories of the Black Sea bursting its banks may have inspired Noah's great flood." "The Exodus story may echo the real exodus of a foreign dynasty from Egypt." "And here in Jericho," "Jonathan can see the roots of another incredible tale." "These mounds are all that is left of the oldest city on earth." "The Bible says it was here that Joshua and his army marched round and round, blowing trumpets and bringing the city walls tumbling down." "Excavations found ancient walls had been repeatedly rebuilt because of earthquake damage." "Jonathan believes it was this constant destruction that passed into folklore." "I think the situation with regards to Jericho may well be something like this." "When the Bible-writers were putting together the story of Joshua's conquest of the land of Canaan they reached Jericho, and somebody said hang on a second," "Jericho?" "Jericho?" "Ah, that's where all the walls came falling down." "All you've got to do then, throw in a few trumpets and you've got a great story." "So in effect, what you've done, you've taken a kernel of historical reality which may actually have happened 5,000 years ago and you've transplanted it into a new time-frame." "We may be dealing with a similar situation with regards to Sodom and Gomorrah." "If the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is grounded in reality, when could it have happened?" "The clues are in the Bible." "The Old Testament story begins by describing Lot's journey east out of Egypt, to the land of Canaan, to find good grazing for his livestock." "He settled amongst the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom." "By analysing the ruins found in the region, archaeologists can narrow down the date of the story." "The Bible specifically refers to the Cities of the Plain." "And in the whole history of Palestine there was only really one period when there were cities of the plain in the region of the Dead Sea." "And that period is precisely the early Bronze Age, from about 2800 BC down to about 2300 BC, the early Bronze Age." "But are the Bronze Age settlements found here large enough to fit the Old Testament's description of thriving cities?" "To answer that, Jonathan has returned to his own excavation site" "Tell es-Sa'idiyeh, north of the Dead Sea." "Here, he uncovered room after room of a massive building." "Far too big to be a simple dwelling." "Inside,he came upon an extraordinary range of pottery." "Some of which he'd never seen before." "The question was, what was it made for." "The answer would convince him he'd found the site of an ancient city." "The secret as to what was happening in this early Bronze Age complex was given by this one room here, because the whole of the floor surface was covered with shards of very large store jars." "Amidst all of these shards however, was something even more interesting, a layer about two centimetres thick of olive stones." "And also, scattered amongst the olive stones were groups of shells, in groups of seven or thirteen, interestingly, almost as if they'd been used as counters or reckoners to keep a tally of something." "It then became crystal clear, when we started to put all of the evidence together, we were dealing with olive oil production." "Jonathan is convinced he's found an ancient olive oil factory which would have only existed in a city." "The sheer scale of sites like Tell es-Sa'idiyeh shows that cities fitting the biblical description of Sodom did exist, but only in the 500 years up to 2300 BC." "After that, they were all abandoned." "If Graham's theory is right, this was the only period when there were thriving cities that could have been struck by a natural disaster." "But what about the extraordinary geology of the region, does it support Graham's theory?" "One of the Natural Wonders of the world the Dead Sea is the lowest place on the face of the planet." "It lies nearly half a kilometre below sea level." "For Lynn Frostick it's a scientific miracle." "The landscape is very dramatic, the geology is very dramatic." "It's just one of the most wonderful places I think, for a geologist to be." "The Dead Sea is a completely unique place on the surface of the earth." "It sits along a very large crack." "What's happened here is that the earth has torn apart, and the bottom has dropped out of this area, it's dropped down, it's fallen down into what's known as a pull-apart basin." "The Dead Sea fills the bottom of this deep hole in the ground." "But it isn't actually a sea at all, it's the saltiest lake in the world." "And it lies at the centre of a highly active earthquake zone." "The Dead Sea separates two continents:" "on one side we've got the Arabian plate, a tectonic plate, which is actually moving northwards, and on the Israeli side we have a part of, effectively what is the African plate, which is moving slightly southwards," "so the two sides of this area are moving against each other all the time." "The plates, as they move against each other, obviously aren't very smooth, and so they effectively stick, but the movement goes on all the time they're stuck, and eventually they'll fail, and they fail catastrophically," "and that's what causes an earthquake." "There are regular earthquakes in the Dead Sea region, but is there any evidence that one struck in the 500 years that cities existed here?" "On the Jordanian side of the lake lies the ancient ruined village of Numeira." "Amongst the jumbled piles of stones archaeologists have found something quite unexpected." "Graham has come here because their discovery might be just what he needs to prove an earthquake hit the region at the right time." "Mike Finnegan is a forensic anthropologist." "He studies human remains to find out how people met their death." "And when the skeletons of three men were unearthed at Numeira something immediately caught his attention." "This individual has many broken bones." "An example is on the tibia or shin bone, we have these diagonal breaks." "When bone is alive, wet, dynamic it typically breaks in diagonal marks, and here is such a feature." "Mike believes there is only one explanation for these breaks, the men were crushed to death." "And now he thinks he knows how." "What we think is that an earthquake may have happened, a mild one." "The people who lived in the village evacuated the village, and then we think maybe these three individuals were left behind, possibly as guards." "And as another earthquake shock came along, the roof fell in," "covering these individuals causing their death." "The beams that make up the roof have been carbon-dated, and it suggests that 2350 BC was the date when this all fell in." "2350 BC." "Nearly four and a half thousand years ago." "Exactly the right time and the right area." "But when the Bible describes how Sodom and Gomorrah were overturned in one brutal night it doesn't specifically lay the blame on an earthquake." "Instead, it tells how the Lord rained fire and brimstone out of heaven, how the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace." "Fires are a feature of modern earthquakes, but that's only because they rupture gas-pipes." "ln 1995 the earthquake that struck Kobe in Japan snapped the city's gas supply." "Stray sparks ignited infernos." "Yet, there were no gas-pipes four and a half thousand years ago." "So where did the biblical fire come from?" "It turns out, the rocks around the Dead Sea conceal an explosive secret." "Back in the 1980s the Jordanians were preparing to build a road along the shore of the lake." "They made some test drills just a few hundred metres down into the rock." "What they found caught them completely by surprise." "Flammable methane gas came rushing to the surface, and a rogue spark set it on fire." "An ancient earthquake could have ripped cracks in the ground, sending methane shooting into the sky." "The landscape would have been engulfed." "The Old Testament would have had its fire and brimstone." "But would this earthquake have been big enough to make entire cities disappear?" "To find out, Lynn has come to a site on the Israeli side of the lake." "She's here to meet geologist Shmuel Marco." "He has found evidence of ancient earthquakes embedded in the rocks around the Dead Sea." "70,000 years ago the lake was much bigger, and sediments left on the old lake bed are now exposed." "All this startling soft white rock was formed as layer upon layer built up every year." "And it is these layers that hold clues to the strength of centuries old earthquakes." "Well, the layering's much clearer when you clean it off." "Yes." "You can see that there was two kinds of layers." "Every winter, rock debris was washed down from the mountains and created a brown layer." "Every summer, the lake's evaporation caused fine, white particles of chalk to drift to the bottom of the lake, a white layer." "This cycle was repeated each year." "But in places, the delicate pattern has been interrupted." "Shmuel believes this was caused by earthquakes stirring up the lake bed." "We have a nice proof for these being an earthquake, because these layers terminate at the fault." "We see a fault here." "Oh, that's brilliant." "I can see that very clearly." "By measuring how far the fault has slipped the displacement," "Shmuel can tell the extent of earthquake activity." "So quite a bit of displacement on this fault?" "Yes." "Altogether, one metre and seventy-five centimetres of displacement." "Have you got any idea of how big an earthquake would actually cause this sort of disturbance?" "At least magnitude 6." "Because we know that earthquakes below magnitude 6 will not tear the surface of the earth." "So this will have come out at the surface?" "It will form a step at the bottom of the lake." "A step on the bottom, yeah." "And so we know that by the modern examples, that these are strong earthquakes, probably destructive earthquakes of magnitude 6." "Earthquakes this size would not have obliterated cities altogether, they would have left ruins." "So what might have happened to the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah?" "Once again, the clue is in the Old Testament, where angels warned Lot:" ""Flee to the hills, or you will be swept away."" "This is where the next part of Graham's theory comes in." "He believes that the earthquake was catastrophic because of the perilous land on which the cities were built." "The cities needed to be close to a source of fresh water." "But the rivers here are a mixed blessing: dry in summer, they become raging torrents when the winter rains come." "These flash floods dump huge amounts of sand and gravel on the shores of the Dead Sea, creating unstable ground." "With major cities sited very close to the water's edge, on relatively unstable ground, a very major earthquake could well have resulted in a landslide of apocalyptic proportions." "When this kind of terrain is hit by an earthquake it can do something quite extraordinary." "Geologists call it liquefaction, when ground can literally turn to liquid." "Well, liquefaction is extremely common earthquake zones, and the reason for this is that where you get material which is very loose, badly packed, very holey, lots of holes in it, and if that's actually filled with water," "when the whole thing is shaken, all the bits move down to the bottom and the water gushes out at the surface." "It's very similar to the sort of thing you see on a beach when you jump on sand, it turns to jelly and all the water comes out." "The only time liquefaction has been caught on camera was after a Japanese earthquake in 1964." "The gushing water looks like a burst water-main but, in fact, it's being forced out of tiny pores in the ground." "The sand and gravel layers at the edge of the Dead Sea are perfect for liquefaction." "And along the shore," "Lynn spots the tell-tale signs." "These great swirls of sand are just what she'd expect to see in ground that liquefied thousands of years ago." "Well, originally, all of this sand would have been horizontal." "And it's not like that anymore." "The water coming out of the sediment has changed all the layers, disrupted them and turned them to a great swirly pattern." "When ground liquefies the effect on anything built on it is devastating." "The harbour in Kobe was completely destroyed when the earthquake hit in 1995." "All this area liquefied because it was built on loosely packed ground, the same kind of ground conditions found by the Dead Sea." "I think the chances of a major liquefaction event are very high." "This material is easy to liquefy, and once it does liquefy the water has difficulty escaping, the pressure builds up and when it does go, it goes in a big way." "Few buildings remain standing after ground has liquefied." "But Graham believes that Sodom and Gomorrah would have suffered even more than Kobe." "He thinks that the gently sloping land by the Dead Sea would have been swept away in a landslide, erasing all trace of the cities." "But his landslide theory is, itself, built on shaky ground." "For it to have any credibility Sodom and Gomorrah would to have stood on the very edge of the Dead Sea, the only place where the ground is liquifiable." "Yet, this stony landscape would have been poor farmland." "Why would thousands of people have made it their home?" "It is, indeed,a very inhospitable and barren area." "And undoubtedly, it was just as inhospitable in days of antiquity." "The only reason that I can think that people would have lived in this area is, undoubtedly, the large mineral resources that exist here." "Graham believes there is one naturally occurring substance that would have attracted the people of" "Sodom and Gomorrah to settle here." "Asphalt." "ln ancient times, asphalt was a valuable commodity." "lts water-proof and adhesive qualities were in great demand." "Before the invention of cement, it held stone blocks in place." "It was an essential part of boat-building, keeping vessels dry." "The Egyptians used it in a secret recipe to embalm their dead." "The ancient word moumiah, mummy to us, means asphalt." "The Romans had a name for the Dead Sea" "Lacus Asphaltitus." "Strabo, the Greek geographer, describes how it was harvested in Roman times." "And there's no reason to disbelieve that it wasn't harvested in a similar manner previous to that." "To find out whether the Dead Sea asphalt was used in biblical times," "Jonathan has met up with organic chemist Arie Nissenbaum." "They've come to this dry river-bed that opens into the Dead Sea, because it's one of the few places where natural asphalt is still found today." "Here, we are looking at the face of the cliff which is all covered with asphalt." "For example, right here." "It's pretty messy sort of stuff." "This stuff is full with sand, pebbles, other detritus material, so it needs processing to get it out of the rock." "ln the Dead Sea area there are other types of asphalt which are much easier to work with." "And let me show you an example." "If you look at this sample here." "Oh, wow." "That's part of an asphalt block.." "It's a mirror." "which can be found occasionally and sporadically on the Dead Sea, floating on the Dead Sea itself." "It's very pure." "It's very pure." "It's about 99.99% pure material." "Gosh." "How big do these blocks get,Arie?" "Well, these blocks can get pretty big." "Some of them can reach the weight of several tons." "For example, here you can see the size of such blocks." "Good heavens, these are big." "They are big, yeah." "That's about a ton and a half in weight." "But is there any evidence asphalt was an important trading commodity?" "Arie has chemically fingerprinted the asphalt in a floating block and compared it to traces found in Egypt." "Here's a sample of asphalt which was found in Maadi, a suburb of Cairo, Egypt, which goes back to the early Bronze Age, the beginning of the early Bronze Age." "And here's the same type of compound, the same type of fingerprinting as can be found in the Dead Sea material, and they match up almost exactly." "That really is almost exact, isn't it?" "That's very, very clear indeed." "Yeah. indicating that, indeed, material was exported almost 5,000 years ago from the Dead Sea basin to Egypt." "Very good." "So the black gold given up by the salty waters would have been too tempting to ignore." "It was such a valuable source of income that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah may have unwittingly built their cities on perilously unstable shores." "Lynn and Jonathan have found evidence to support all the ingredients for Graham's theory." "Cities did exist in the time of Genesis." "There was at least one earthquake during this period, and the ground was unstable." "But a crucial question remains:" "could all these ingredients have combined to create a massive landslide." "Now, in a unique experiments, modern science can put this ancient apocalypse to the test." "Everything hangs on a machine in this building in Cambridge." "The machine is so powerful it creates forces that would crush a man in seconds." "And it's only a machine this formidable that can recreate what may have happened in the Dead Sea four and a half thousand years ago." "It's a centrifuge." "It can spin round 150 times a minute." "The faster a centrifuge spins the greater the force of gravity at the end of the arm." "Fighter pilots are trained on centrifuges to simulate the extreme G-force on take-off." "Spinning 50 times a minute, an 80 kilo pilot feels as if he weighs ten times more." "And the huge forces also makes scale models of buildings behave like the real thing." "Engineers can then simulate an earthquake to test the building's strength." "The Cambridge experiments are so accurate they've even been used to determine where it's safe to build nuclear power stations." "We are going to create a model village which represents the type of buildings that would have existed 4,500 years back in the villages of Sodom and Gomorrah." "The idea is to see whether if there is a medium strength earthquake, is it possible for these villages to actually have disappeared into the Dead Sea." "The most important part of the model is the careful recreation of unstable ground, simulating the layers of sand and clay found by the shores of the Dead Sea." "The first layer is ready." "Sand which has been completely saturated to represent the water table of the lake." "If Sodom and Gomorrah were victims of a landslide, how the next layer behaves will be the ultimate test for Graham's theory." "Made of pulverised rock rock flour it simulates the impermeable clay found between the layers of sand." "If liquefaction occurs water will be shaken out of the sand, but become trapped below this impermeable layer." "If the water builds up enough pressure, it'll create a slippery cushion." "The land above it will slide off." "Once safely installed the model is ready to be plugged into sensors." "It's the sensors which will measure in minute detail the all-important build-up of water pressure." "Another wire connects to an earthquake simulator." "Lynn has told the Cambridge team to assume a magnitude 6 earthquake." "Finally, the buildings can be added." "What may look like rudimentary models are, in fact, precisely constructed to data supplied by Jonathan." "When they're spun in the centrifuge the huge G-forces generated will make them behave like life-size buildings." "As the centrifuge picks up speed the centrifugal force lifts the model up." "Now the centrifuge is spinning 65 times a minute." "It's already generating 20 G-force, more than a human could survive." "But for the model to behave as if it were real, the centrifuge has to spin even faster." "Now the centrifuge has reached its target speed, creating 50 G." "The model has 50 times the force of gravity pressing down on it." "The houses will now react like life-size buildings." "This is the point when the earthquake can be fired." "Suddenly, the picture from the on-board camera breaks up." "The experiment is completed." "But for the moment, it's impossible to see what has happened." "Only when the centrifuge comes to a safe stop can Gopal check the result." "Wow!" "Oh, it's done a lot." "The houses have sunk by quite a bit." "You can see where the seashore was before, you can see all the oil has gone pretty much." "I think it must have settled by at least a metre." "Remember when we made the model we had rock flour as an impermeable layer, stopping the water pressure from getting out." "Now, what we have here is the incredible water pressures that built up following the earthquake, have actually pushed this fine material with it and brought it to the ground surface." "And once this appeared it can be virtually guaranteed that the ground below has liquefied fully." "The houses have sunk in to the liquefied ground by the equivalent of a full metre." "But they seem to have barely moved sideways." "What we have seen here in the model is a clear sign of liquefaction." "Now, the landslide in this case is being stopped by the end wall of the box." "Without the end wall of the box the landslide would have continued for much longer." "But we cannot confirm this until we look carefully at the data." "From thousands of measurements picked up by the sensors," "Gopal has found an extraordinary result." "Water, shaken out of the sand layer, did become trapped by the impermeable rock flour and did create a slippery cushion." "What amazed Gopal was how long it was trapped for, and how far the buildings would have slid." "What would have happened is that the buildings and the land mass at the top would have slid on the top of this water for about 15 minutes and would have moved many, many kilometres." "ln real terms, what this would have meant is that all the houses would have ended up at the bottom of the Dead Sea." "The experiment points to a scene of utter calamity." "Moments after the earthquake struck, fires would have broken out." "The ground underneath the cities would have turned to quicksand." "The buildings wouldn't have stood a chance as they started their relentless slide towards the Dead Sea." "Total devastation." "All the people would have perished, and total and complete destruction of the entire city in a matter of 15, 20 minutes." "Gopal has no doubt that the experiment supports Graham's theory." "Now it's the turn of the rest of the team to see the results." "For Graham in particular, it's a nervous moment as he sees his cherished idea put to the test." "To be quite honest, I am absolutely delighted." "ln fact, I'm ecstatic if, you know, that word could be applied to someone of such a dour personality as myself." "But what it has done is widened the whole area of search now, because we have produced potential areas underwater, you know, that perhaps need to be evaluated." "Graham is now convinced Sodom and Gomorrah are underwater." "Jonathan believes that liquefaction could have inspired the Bible story, but that the ruins may remain on dry land." "The experiment has persuaded him of one thing, though." "Because it would have produced a cataclysmic event so memorable that people would have remembered it and put it into folk tradition for a long time afterwards." "It has tested out the feasibility of there being, first of all, major liquefaction and, secondly, major failure." "And what it's come out with is it's said both of those are possible, both of those could have happened." "So, although the Old Testament legend cannot be taken literally, the devastating landslide it hints at may well have been inspired by a real catastrophe." "Graham is thrilled his theory stands up to scientific scrutiny." "His greatest hope now is that geologists and archaeologists will follow his lead, and embark on an underwater search for the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah." "He believes it could lead to a momentous discovery." "The ultimate goal is to obtain organic remains, whether they be people or whether it be wood that was used at the time of Sodom and Gomorrah." "And once we have got that we can radiocarbon date them and then we have got a fixed date on a very, very early biblical episode." "We would be pushing back the frontiers of knowledge of the Bible."