Science & Planet, there are already more than 500 years, as silent and mysterious witnesses of a lost civilization: the world-famous images on the Chilean easter island. But if there is not rapid intervention, there will be about a hundred years nothing else left of the images than rectangular stones.
The centuries ago carved sculptures represent the ancestors of the Polynesian population of easter island, the Rapa Nui, and belong to the UNESCO world Heritage site. The hundreds of large heads along the coastline of the small island, one of the most isolated in the world. Still ask archaeologists how the inhabitants of the thousands of kilos of heavy images ever on their place. Easter island, is 3,500 kilometres from the mainland and more than 2,000 kilometres from the nearest island, Pitcairn.
But the images of suffering, according to scientists, a kind of ‘leprosy’. They get white patches on their faces. The lichens, a combination of fungus and algae, stripping the images, which makes the stone soft like clay and changes its shape. The images suffer, in addition, by erosion, rising sea levels, high winds, and cattle between them to graze.
