Science works to save a salty world treasure
Water and pollution threaten Poland’s 700-year-old World Heritage Site
Kathiann Kowalski
Nov 9, 2017 — 6:45 am EST
WIELICZKA, Poland — Shining a flashlight, Marek Klimowicz [KLEE-moh-veech] leads me through a dimly lit tunnel. Old wooden timbers support the roof and walls of rock. The tunnel leads us to a warren of rooms large and small. With few exceptions, Klimowicz says, “Everything here is salt.”
There’s salt above us. We walk on a floor of salt. Just an arm’s length away are walls of salt. In all, this underground warren contains some 2,000 chambers. They span a vast 7 million cubic meters (265 million cubic feet). That’s nearly triple the volume inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. And it’s almost twice the volume of the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building, where huge rockets were built, in Florida.
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/science-works-save-salty-world-treasure
