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.
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