Easter Island ‘Moai’ statues face irreparable damage after wildfire

[samhexum]

A number of Easter Island’s iconic ‘Moai’ stone statues suffered irreparable damage after a wildfire swept through the island earlier this week, the island’s mayor told Reuters on Friday.

“It’s unquantifiable, unmeasurable, the damage there is, it’s irrecoverable,” said Pedro Edmunds, mayor of Easter Island, a territory of Chile. “Because what the fire does is heat the rock and the rock cracks.”

He said scientists are going to visit the island alongside park administrators to evaluate the extent of the damage and determine what can be done.

“I don’t know if there’s a solution for this,” Edmunds said.

A preliminary report released by Chile’s culture, arts and heritage ministry stated that a wildfire that started on Tuesday swept through more than 148.26 acres and damaged an unknown number of the sacred Moai statues.

The report did not state a cause for the wildfire and said there would be further investigations into the fire and the damage it caused.

[+ friendofsheila]

I thought they were made aout of lava rock.

[Guest]

Given their immense value not only from an archeological but also touristic perspective, one would think more efforts might have been made to protect the icons from such a possibility. Doesn't UNESCO have funds for this type of stuff?

[samhexum]

A new moai was found on Easter Island in the bed of a volcano crater lake, thanks to severe drought conditions in the area.  

The lake where the moai was found had begun drying up in 2018.  The interesting thing is that, for at least the last 200 or 300 years, the laguna was three meters deep, meaning no human being could have left the moai there in that time. 

The recently discovered moai measures just five feet tall and was found by the researchers on its side, looking toward the sky.

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archeologist and the director of the Easter Island Statue Project, told Fox Weather that given the current weather conditions and likelihood of future excavations, more moai discoveries are all but certain. 

“We finished a lot of mapping and documentation of the quarry between 2018 and 2019, and what we found was that there was a lot more evidence of more quarrying on the outside than we had originally thought,” Van Tilburg stated. “One hundred percent they’ll be more discoveries like this.”

There are more than 900 moai across Easter Island.