The Sodom Airburst Retraction and the Clickbait Index

Session: Myths and Misrepresentations surrounding Cosmic Impact claims in Paleoclimatology, Paleontology, Paleoecology, Geoarchaeology, and Quaternary Research

Presenting Author:

Author:

Abstract:

On Sept. 20, 2021, the paper, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el‑Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” was published by Bunch et al. and the Comet Research Group (CRG). I was notified that day by a colleague who wrote, “I suspect you've seen the recent Nature paper about the airburst in the Jordan Valley.” 

It was actually published by Nature Scientific Reports, which is not Nature. Many others were also misled by the “nature.com” domain, and this confusion was exploited by one of the paper’s coauthors. The group’s “Cosmic Tusk” blogger and cofounder of the CRG that cosponsored the work tweeted, “This week's Monday night post is on today's Nature pub on our discovery of Sodom.”

He left ambiguous which “Nature pub” he was referencing but didn’t keep his followers guessing about the subject matter. His coauthors put out multiple press releases, blogs, and social media posts the day it was published. All played up the Sodom connection. The Cosmic Tusk announcement didn’t talk about the science other than to say that the paper had “extraordinary implications for science and faith” and that “the data also support significant portions of the Book of Genesis itself.”

The intense focus by the authors on Sodom and the biblical implications turned out to be a winning formula for boosting clicks and maximizing their paper’s Altmetric score (a published measure of online engagement). The CRG press release was titled, “Fire from the Sky destroyed Ancient City, possible source of the Biblical Story of Sodom,” and stated, “The flash of heat and devastation described in the new publication supports the story of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19:24-29.”

This presentation will describe the damage that this type of clickbait-oriented science-by-press-release can do to the credibility of a field. It introduces the concept of a Clickbait Index (CBI) that is based on the ratio of Altimetric score to citation count and appears to be inversely correlated with a paper’s scientific legitimacy. Of the top five CBI papers of 2020, as of 2022, one had been retracted and one had been withdrawn. The now-retracted Sodom airburst paper by Bunch et al (2021) had a similarly high CBI.

© Copyright 2026 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved.