Wednesday, December 22, 2010

[Geology2] Beneath the Dead Sea, Scientists Are Drilling for Natural History

Beneath the Dead Sea, Scientists Are Drilling for Natural History

Five miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international
team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a
record of
climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million
years.

The preliminary evidence and clues found halfway through the 40-day
project are more than the team could have hoped for. The scientists did
not
expect to pull up a wood fragment that was roughly 400,000 years old.
Nor did
they expect to come across a layer of gravel from a mere 50,000 to
100,000
years ago. That finding would seem to indicate that what is now the
middle of
the Dead Sea--which is really a big salt lake--was once a shore, and
that
the water level had managed to recover naturally.

"We knew the lake went through high levels and lower levels," said Prof.
Zvi Ben-Avraham, a leading Dead Sea expert and the driving force behind
the
project, "but we did not know it got so low." Professor Ben-Avraham, a
member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and chief of the
Minerva Dead Sea Research Center at Tel Aviv University, had been
pushing for
such a drilling operation for 10 years.

http://ow.ly/3syaO

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