Post date: Nov 25, 2010 7:32:23 PM
An Israeli-led research team drills through half a million years of history in the deepest point of earth, hoping to uncover secrets of climate change and natural disasters.
DEAD SEA, ISRAEL (NOVEMBER 23, 2010) REUTERS - From a barge floating above the deepest point on earth, a research team hopes to drill through half a million years of history to uncover secrets of climate change and natural disasters.
Boring into the bed of the Dead Sea, the group of engineers and scientists began extracting layers of the earth's core on Sunday (November 21), and will continue for about two months until they reach a depth of 1,200 metres below sea level.
The Dead Sea, according to project head Zvi Ben Avraham, collects water run-off from Egypt's Sinai desert up to the Golan Heights, an area of about 42,000 square kilometres, providing plenty of material for climate research and earthquakes records.
The desert shore of the Dead Sea is already some 420 metres below sea level. The sea is also on a fault line between two continental plates moving at different speeds, causing much tectonic activity.
Like trees have rings, the sea bed adds two layers of sediment every year. The team will analyze 500,000 years of geological history, deciphering patterns and using them to help understand the future, said Ben-Avraham.
One of the research team members, Adi Torfstein, told reporters aboard the drilling barge that Dead Sea sediments may help understand present-day global warming.
"These sequences represent climate changes which can be followed over tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands of years and we can reconstruct these climate changes in this area and better understand the present-day global warming, for example, and other climate changes here and in other places of the world," Torfstein said as he held a sediment sample just taken out of the drilling pipe.
The Dead Sea is a favourite spot for tourists because of the bouyant and healing properties of its extremely salty waters. It is also among 14 finalists in a global internet vote to choose seven wonders of the natural world.
But scientists and environmentalists have been scrambling in recent years to come up with a solution to the lake's receding shoreline, for which many blame regional water mismanagement. The team hopes the drilling may provide some historical insight.
The project, led by the Israel Academy for Science and Humanities, is part of the International Continental Drilling Program, which has seen dozens of holes drilled across the globe in an effort to find the best way to manage the earth's resources and environment.
Ben-Avraham said taking part in the Dead Sea project are members from around the world, including neighboring Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. The drilling falls within Israel's borders.
Operating the rig day and night, and contending with the water's high salt concentration, is a team from Utah-based DOSECC, a non-profit corporation who works on similar projects around the world.
They will drill a five-centimetre-wide hole, which is much smaller than those used to find oil, and not stop until they reach 500 meters, said operations manager Beau Marshall. Core samples will then be sent to be analysed and archived, he said.
"We've drilled a lot of fresh water lakes, we've done some salt water activity as well, but the Dead Sea is quite unique," Marshall said on the barge, floating higher than it does in normal waters. "It's gonna require us to keep everything well lubricated and cleaned up because the salt will wreak havoc on our equipment."
Ben Avraham said the project, the largest in the history of Israeli earth research, was a once-in a lifetime effort.
"What you see here is the largest project ever to conduct in Israel, in earth sciences. And I don't see in the forseeable future that we can repeat such an effort. So this is once in a lifetime project, there's no question about it. That's it," Ben Avraham said.