Posted on 12/16/2011 3:38:24 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The Dead Sea nearly disappeared about 120,000 years ago, say researchers who drilled more than 1,500 feet below one of the deepest parts of the politically contentious body of water.
The discovery looms large at a time when the Dead Sea is shrinking rapidly, Middle Eastern nations are battling over water rights, and experts hotly debate whether the salt lake could ever dry up completely in the years to come.
New data from drilled deposits are also helping piece together geological history that slices through Biblical times. Further research may offer opportunities to verify whether earthquakes destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah or if Joseph stockpiled grains in Egypt to weather a real famine.
The new research started, not as an attempt to investigate Biblical events, but to understand the history of the Dead Sea, which has been drying up at dramatic rates in recent decades... an international team of researchers drilled down about 460 m (more than 1,500 feet) into sediments of the Dead Sea in Israeli territory at a spot that was just slightly shallower than the lake's deepest point, which lay on the other side of the border in Jordan. The cores they pulled up stretched back 200,000 years.
At a level corresponding with 120,000 years ago, during a warm period between ice ages, the researchers found a layer of small round pebbles sitting on top of 45 meters (nearly 150 feet) of thick salt deposits. Those pebbles, they announced this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, look just like the rocks that normally appear on the lake's beaches -- suggesting that one of the deepest parts of the lake was once dry.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Regarding Soddom and Gommorah, I think it was a large meteorite that caused it. About 30 years ago in The National Geographic I saw an article about a fellow who was searching for an iron meteorite in southern Saudi Arabia in the Rub al Kali (Empty Quarter) desert. They found it and it was at least 4 feet in diameter and 2 feet thick. I believe the place name was Wabar. The story is that God sent the meteor to destroy a wicked city. I also wonder if the desolation of the Empty Quarter might have been caused by a major boloid blast.
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