Cleopatra's Palace - Proposed Underwater Museum

[commodus]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/09/080916-underwater-museum.html

[museumguy]

Fascinating!  Thanks for sharing Commodus!  I hope the project is not too ambitious and that the artifacts will be protected and future archaeology in this location won't be impeded by the construction.

Steve

[awl]

Interesting. Is the Nile's water actually clear enough to see the artifacts? I would not like to see them spend all of this money submerging the museum and then having the water be too murky.

[*Alex]

Interesting. Is the Nile's water actually clear enough to see the artifacts? I would not like to see them spend all of this money submerging the museum and then having the water be too murky.

The artefacts aren't submerged in the Nile, they are submerged in the Mediterranean Sea just off the coast at present day Alexandria. The water should be perfectly clear as long as no great depth is involved.

Alex.

[Robert_Brenchley]

From what itsays in the article, the water is too muddy, and they'd either have to clean it (sounds a tall order!) or build an artificial lagoon around the museum. The Nile itself is probably very muddy indeed, as it's massive continental river with a huge delta, which implies a vast amount of sediment coming down.

[jmuona]

The amount of sediment coming out has decreased after the building of the dam-system and the whole delta region is believed to vanish, see e.g.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/00253227/1996/00000129/00000003/art83344


This is the abstract of that particular scientific article:
Author: Stanley D.J.1
Source: Marine Geology, Volume 129, Number 3, January 1996 , pp. 189-195(7)
Publisher: Elsevier

"Accelerated erosion of Egypt's Nile delta coast during this century has generally been attributed to construction of two dams at Aswan, entrapment of sediment in Lake Nasser behind the High Dam, and effects of barrages and river control structures on River Nile deposition below Aswan. Also considered important are natural factors, including delta subsidence, rising sea level and strong coastal current processes.This study proposes that more influential in controlling coastal land loss is the near-complete entrapment of modern and reworked Nile sediment on the Nile delta plain. Sediment is primarily retained in an extremely dense network of irrigation and drain channels, and also in wetlands in the northern delta. The increased number of artificial canals, more than 10,000 km of waterway, is a response to Egypt's drive to augment its much-needed agricultural production by perennial irrigation. The drastically reduced amount of sediment now reaching the sea, discharged primarily from lagoon outlets and several canal mouths, is removed by strong, easterly-directed coastal and innermost shelf currents. The Nile delta is an extreme example of a depocenter which has been completely altered by man, from an active prograding delta to a locally eroding coastal plain."

s.
Jyrki Muona

[Robert_Brenchley]

Deltas are very delicate environments that are easily altered beyond recognition. None of it is likely to be more than a few feet above sealevel, and the Earth's crust below it will be sinking slightly due to the accumulated weight of sediment; the mantle underneath it will flow slowly to allow this. If you subtract the steady accumulation of sediment, and add the rise in sea level likely due to global warming, it may well disappear altogether. With sea level going up and down like a yoyo over the last couple of million years due to the glaciers first soaking up vast amounts of water, then melting agin, it will have disappeared and reappeared multiple times already.