(Masada Part 1) How did it happen?

– Especially for Mrs. Kari Conklin, LLC –

Once upon a time… before Elijah glanced up at a lonely mesa at the edge of the Dead Sea…

• Long before Alexander Jannaeus constructed his fort in the sky,
• Even longer before King Herod the Great placed palaces inside that fort,
• And just a really, really long time before Elijah missed my dad as he stepped into that Swiss-built gondola and rode its cable up to explore those palaces…

Once upon a time, said the engineer, Masada might have been simply a few normal looking acres within a large plain.

I asked this engineer, my cousin, Donald Ingram, “How did most of that large plain go away and leave only a mesa stretching 450 yards into the sky?”

Under water

Donald replied, “Perhaps it all started under water.”

Before I got a chance to ask, “Like the Culligan Man?” he supplied engineer-type observations (which he noted are not unique with him):

1. Water alone, however, cannot move a large stone.
2. The density of rocks is about 2.5 to 2.9 times that of water.
3. A rock immersed in water will buoy to an effective weight of only 1.5 to 1.9 times that of the same volume of water.
4. When big rocks are accompanied by little rocks, and smaller rocks, and smaller grains in a mud-like mixture, the % of water content becomes smaller and smaller, and the density of the mud approaches that of solid rock.
5. High density mud can almost “float” any rock.
6. Mudslides consist of whole hillsides, even the whole side of a mountain.
7. Mudslides mimic glaciers in their scouring action. They carve whole valleys.
8. One mountain was documented to have slidden for miles at speeds of up to 100 miles/hour.”

Slid, slide, slud

I asked, “Could we say the mountain ‘slud’ — like Dizzy Dean announced the runner ‘slud into third’?” The engineer consulted his sliderule about slud, but as he looked up, I sensed my question sliding away.

The dam broke

“Perhaps the water so saturated the ground that the whole countryside was a mud flat held in place by a dam. When the dam broke, the mud floated away, all except the island of Masada. Perhaps.”

“All this destruction,” I pondered,  “just because one little Dutch boy’s sister called him home for supper?”

• For posts authored by Donald Ingram – click here.
• The Rock-in-Water photo is by Shinystocks.