Australian coastal erosion, floods, fires, cyclones and other extreme weather events are becoming more severe as a result of global warming. Archaeologists and historians have warned that they have already caused extensive damage to rock drawings that have been preserved for tens of thousands of years, MTI is quoted by The Guardian.
In response to this year’s Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia held a symposium on Tuesday. The report warned that as global temperatures rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the number of extreme weather events will increase.
However, the report highlighted that some changes are already inevitable and irreversible.
Daryl WesleyAn archaeologist at Flinders University said about a cyclone called Monica, which devastated in 2006 one of the fiercest tropical cyclones in Australia in the north of the continent, that it actually destroyed half of the trees in a strip 50 kilometers wide, pushing some of them into rock formations and destroying them. Then a very severe fire broke out due to the combustion products left by Monica.
Stone drawings were often made of sandstone, which could absorb a lot of water. Due to the heat of the fire, the water heats up and expands and then the rock explodes, destroying the rock drawings.
Wesley, who has documented changes over the past 56 years, believes that a number of artworks have already been destroyed by environmental and human factors, but the climate crisis is exacerbating the situation.
An archaeologist at Griffith University, Gillian Huntley They discovered that in the world’s oldest paintings, rocks collapse due to the contraction and expansion of salt crystals due to changing weather.
Huntley studies rock paintings in the monsoon region of Australia, which stretches from northern Australia to Indonesia. According to him, the phenomenon caused by salt can also be observed in the northern regions of Australia and the Western Pilbara region. The expert said that the crystallization process is being accelerated by climate change, which is more severe in the tropics.
The temperature here is three times higher than the rest of the world. Warming to 2.4°C means 6°C in the tropics, which is disastrous
Huntley said.
