Word: cave
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...system was designed to automate the process and improve on it, using two massive fans to pull air toward the cold point. The intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave. "Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible," says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. "This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system...
...machinery may not be what introduced the fungus to the cave. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the LRMH, says that the presence of formaldehyde--used for decades as a foot wash to prevent fungal infections--may have killed off many other organisms present in Lascaux that might have prevented the explosion of fusarium. "The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere," says Pallot-Frossard. "It didn't come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take...
...Vitalub, a common ammonium disinfectant. But the fusarium appeared unscathed: scientists later learned that it lived in diabolical symbiosis with a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, which was degrading the fungicide. So the restorers added antibiotics to the mix in which they soaked bandages to plaster the lower walls of the cave. Tons of quicklime, which kills fungus but also temporarily raised the cave's ambient temperature, was spread on the floor. Since the worst of the infection has been brought under control, the team now relies on "mechanical removal"--that is, carefully plucking the filaments from the wall by hand...
Lascaux might have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vezere River in southwestern France in 1940 had not decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree. Soon Abbe Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux's broad galleries might indicate a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory," and people clamored to see it. After the war, the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property...
...beginning of the 1970s, Lascaux had found a kind of stability. The crowds were gone, the lichens banished, and Jacques Marsal, one of the cave's boy discoverers, was in the cave almost every day, alert to even the slightest changes. Studies had determined that the cave could handle about five visitors a day for 35 minutes each, five days a week; that protocol was never exceeded for the next 30 years. Since 1983, the crowds that come to the region have had to settle for Lascaux II, a modern facsimile that gives them an inkling of the cave paintings...