ISRAEL. – The largest salt cave in the world was discovered near the place where, according to the Bible, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, Israeli researchers said on Thursday (28).
The cavern was named Malham and stretches for 10 km, past Mount Sodom, the highest mountain in Israel, and extends to the Dead Sea.
Malham was discovered through the work of Amos Frumkin, founder of the Cave Research Center of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University.
«Malham cave is a river cave. The surface water flowed underground and dissolved the salt, creating caves, a process that continues when heavy rains hit Mount Sodom, about once a year,” explains Professor Amos Frumkin, Director of the Cave Research Center at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University.
Two years ago, Israeli speleologist Yoav Negev decided to complete Frumkin’s work. He joined forces with researcher Boaz Landford to organize a delegation of eight cavers from nine countries to complete the mapping of the cave.
Malham broke the 13-year-old record for the Cave of the Three Nus, a 6,850-meter cave in southern Iran. With the flow of rain dissolving its surfaces, Malham can be further elongated over time.
Mount Sodom is composed almost entirely of a huge block of salt, covered by a thin layer of rock. Rare desert rains seeped into cracks in the rock and dissolved the salt, forming small caves that slope down to the Dead Sea.
Yoav Negev, leader of the Malha cave mapping project, shows the salt stalactites.
(Photo: AFP)
Much of the interior of the cave is covered in a thin layer of dust blown in from the desert. A thin plate that appears to have been cut is nicknamed “The Guillotine”, while the twin plates were given the title “The Ten Commandments”.
For the Negev, Malham falls into a unique category. “There is nothing like it in Israel,” he said, claiming that no other caves came close to the 10km mark. He considers the network of caves to be the “most impressive and complex” in Israel.
Published in: – AFP- Find out daily about all the evangelical Christian news.
Post Visitors:61