Sunday, August 24, 2014

Can Stonehenge Help With Gaza's Tunnels?

Taking a cue from a dear friend after she read a story I sent her, I wonder if this project can assist with Israel's problem with the Hamas terror tunnels.

The details:

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, is a four-year collaboration between a British team and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria that has produced the first detailed underground survey of the area surrounding Stonehenge, totaling more than four square miles...gathered by geophysicists and others wielding magnetometers and ground-penetrating radars that scan the ground to detect structures and objects several yards below the surface...led them to the first GPS-guided magnetometer systems. A magnetometer has sensors that allow a geophysicist to see evidence of historic building, and even ancient ditch-digging, beneath the soil by mapping variations in the earth’s magnetic field. The GPS-guided versions were able to pinpoint some of those discoveries to within one centimeter. The Gaffneys believed that Stonehenge scholarship needed a massive magnetometer- and radar-led survey of the whole site.


And perhaps we're already on the way.

True, the main difficulty Israel has experienced is that the tunnels are much deeper.  Recently, we were informed:

The Israel Defense Forces in the near future will deploy a tunnel detection system on the border of the Gaza Strip, as part of an operational experiment to examine whether a technological solution could discover the digging of tunnels. According to the military, 300 million shekels ($86.5 million) were spent on research and development in the field of tunnel detection since 2007, but so far without any results. Some 700 different projects were examined and thousands of experiments have been carried out, a senior official disclosed on Monday. Two systems failed in operational experiments conducted on the Gaza border eight years ago. The systems will be now redeployed, after improvements and upgrades have been introduced...Among proposed tunnel-detection technologies is the use of vehicle-mounted, ground-penetrating radar. However ,this solution can only detect tunnels to a depth of 10 meters and the last tunnels discovered during the Gaza operation that reached Israeli territory were as much as 25 feet below ground.  Another proposed system takes advantage of the earth’s gravitational field to detect underground voids at great depth. The most advanced method involves geo-seismic methods and buried sensors, which is the system to be used in the current trial.

All we have to do is wait.

And choose a name.

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