due to this catastrophe, so many people died that in many cases the survivors were still small children who barely even learned how to speak their mother tongue
these images appear all over the world, and have the geometric pattern of the "cosmic thunderbolt", which for a long time i didn't realise was the basis of many paleolithic scrawlings of human-looking things that were actually variants of these
these are the geometry of massive earth-originating electrostatic discharges that occur during times when the magnetic flux lines of the galaxy cross at 90' with those of our sun (it's magnetosphere protects us also from galactic radiation and stellar winds) the fields weaken and become less ordered - and it's because of teh unifying influence of the sun's field
when the magnetic flux is more disordered, a lot more electrons end up entering the earth's crust via the polar regions, and eventually enough charge has built up that the difference between the absence of electrons in the upper atmosphere and the surface reach a point where the atmosphere between it is insufficiently resistant to current and a discharge occurs
this phenomena can be seen in earthquakes, because of the high temperature state of the magma, it conducts electricity more than normal, and so the normal level of ground resistance is lower where the eruption is leaking out and this allows the electricity to discharge up into the sky
this Cosmic Thunderbolt is when the level of charge collected in the earth's giant capacitor reaches the point where even ground that is normally highly resistant (eg, soil made mostly out of silica) cannot isolate the earth from the sky and bam!
in combination with this, there is also an overall escalation of cloud formation and when one of these cosmic thunderbolts happens, an enormous amount of water is generated out of all the silica and carbonaceous material that it incinerates, that it escalates a stage further and you see an uptick in rain as well, which also increases the chances of more discharges as the greater density of matter in the atmosphere continues to increase
very likely, both sodom and gomorrah, and the tower of babel stories are related to incidents of cosmic thunderbolts, the amount of energy that comes from these, and the heat, exceed that of the biggest atomic weapons, and literally a person standing in the path of the bright flash will be instantly turned into a pillar of ash
the tower of babel was not a literal attempt to make a giant sky scraper, it was a whole metaphor of the rise of a corrupt, moderately technologically advanced civilization like the one we have now, a global imperium, and when the peak of the cycle, which the first major incident recorded of these catastrophes being Sodom and Gomorrah, all of the cities of this empire were hit by hundreds of these thunderbolts
this is the only logical explanation i can see for how it scattered the languages - that a great number of the survivors were children who wandered off to make their own settlements and built a whole culture out of the childlike understanding of what they had learned before their world was destroyed