Drilling under the Dead Sea through four Ice Ages [ 500K years ]

Jerusalem Post ^ | Wednesday, November 24, 2010 | Ehud Zion Waldoks

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An int'l research team at urging of TAU, Hebrew U. professors will drill half a kilometer to study year-by-year climate change from 500,000 years ago... The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program chose the Dead Sea as the site of its next drilling at the urging of Tel Aviv University's Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham and the Israel Geological Survey's Dr. Mordechai Stein... sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities... "We will be taking out a vertical piece about half a kilometer long which will allow us to get a picture of climate change on a year-by-year basis going back 500,000 years," he said. Ben-Avraham heads the initiative along with Stein of the Hebrew University's Institute of Earth Sciences, and Prof. Michael Lazar of the University of Haifa is project manager. Because the surface of the Dead Sea is more than 400 meters below sea level, it is a drainage basin for water from all over Israel and beyond. That water has brought sediment along with it, which laid layer upon layer of stored geologic information throughout hundreds of thousands of years. The researchers believe the sample will reveal detailed evidence of annual rainfall, climate change, droughts, floods, dust storms, earthquakes and more over the last roughly 500,000 years.

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This topic was posted 11/24/2010, already pinged, this is just an update, because of the upcoming related topic.

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• Dead Sea sediment analyses show 15,000-year-old climate phase periods [05/02/2022]