Cave paintings created around 40,000 years ago on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, among the world’s oldest cave art, are being destroyed by the climate crisis. A new study conducted by researchers at the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit of Griffith University in Australia describes the damage of rock art panels in recent decades due to climate-induced haloclasty, or salt crystallization.1
Hand prints in the Pettakere Cave at Maros-Pangkep, Indonesia (image via Wikipedia Commons)
… i wonder how many cycles of ecological disaster the planet has been through?… i am not at all religious, but i was given exposure to Christianity as a child… responsible parents did that… i liked the story of Noah’s Arc… i combine it with the (Buddhist?) concept of cyclical worlds to render a cyclical series of floods, sort of a Groundhog Day, but spanning hundreds of thousands of years with each epoch offering a full flourishing of the planet and humanity that is summarily wiped off it’s face and started over again by an increasingly frustrated God… lets see if they get it right this time… it is sad to see that record of the current epoch is being erased by the effects of climate change…