Gemstones,
Sandstones,
Indiana Jones

Tom Paradise has auctioned off a 50-carat diamond and the estate of Bing Crosby. He has hiked the basalt lava flows on the Kilauea volcano. Today he studies the impact of nature and tourists on the Valley of the Crescent Moon, made famous after Indiana Jones visited its ancient temples and tombs during his last crusade.

A year after the film was released, tourists to Petra increased from 30,000 to more than 400,000 a year. After more than 100 million online voters chose Petra as one of the seven new wonders of the world, Paradise says he expects even more “hordes of sweating tourists.”

“They rub against the walls, often huffing and puffing and increasing the indoor humidity. In the treasury alone, an increase of 20 visitors is the magic number. An increase from 30 to 50 produces a noticeable spike in the humidity, a change that accelerates the deterioration of the sandstone. Our research indicates that the more people, the faster the decay,” Paradise says.

When he learned that Petra was chosen as a world wonder, media from around the globe called him, wanting to know what he thought.

If such attention leads to more funding for preservation, that would be ideal. What Paradise fears is that even more people will come, grabbing rocks or other souvenirs, and contributing to the erosion of the city’s magnificent ancient buildings.

Paradise travels to Petra every summer, to a land of scorpions, vipers, earthquakes, and hauntingly beautiful cliffs formed by millions of years of wind and rain.

Petra is a crescent-shaped valley confined by high fault-bound sandstone walls that may have been home to more than 50,000 people 2,000 years ago. In the third century B.C., the Nabataeans began using pickaxes and chisels to carve extravagant facades into the sandstone mountains. They melded nature with art on an astonishingly grand scale.

Petra’s two primary formations — the Cambrian Umm Ishrin and Cambrio-Ordivician Disi sandstones — represent the oldest, most widespread, and relatively unaltered sandstones on Earth.

Paradise’s major goal in his research is to craft a cultural preservation plan for Petra. He believes that science without policy is useless, and so as he measures humidity in the tombs, records surface recession, records cycles of thawing, freezing, rain, and drought, and examines mysterious tower tombs, known as djinn blocks, he keeps in mind his larger purpose: to record and preserve these artifacts and the stories they tell.

The large cubes of carved sandstone, or djinn blocks, are perplexing. Paradise says that while they clearly served some religious purpose, scientists still don’t know what they are or what they once represented. Over the years, he has discovered 15 of them, as well as Nabataean writing in unlikely pockets around the city.

The work has had some unexpected rewards. Paradise gave Hillary and Chelsea Clinton a tour, worked with Queen Noor, and was there when townspeople in a nearby village crowned the first Miss Petra, an honor created shortly after Petra was named one of the seven new wonders. He also stayed in the same room in the valley once occupied by Agatha Christie while she was writing Appointment with Death.

As he watches speculators buying up properties around Petra, he knows his job will only become more difficult. This World Heritage site is slowly being loved to death.

“More than 2,000 years of nature have not had as much of a corrosive impact in the valley as 10 years of people have,” says Paradise.

 

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