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Easter Island

Easter Island. The Story. Wild speculation about UFO's, Atlantis, and vanished advanced ancient races has always been a part of the Easter Island debate. Science has made great strides in understanding who made the giant statues of Easter Island and has put to rest these bizarre stories.

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Easter Island

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  1. Easter Island

  2. The Story • Wild speculation about UFO's, Atlantis, and vanished advanced ancient races has always been a part of the Easter Island debate. Science has made great strides in understanding who made the giant statues of Easter Island and has put to rest these bizarre stories.

  3. Lava tubes and pounding waves have created hundreds of sea caves and a treacherous coastline. There are only a few small areas that are safe for anchorages.

  4. Located in the South Pacific between Chile and Tahiti, Easter Island is one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world. Roughly triangular and covering only 64 square miles, it formed when a plume of hot material rose from deep within Earth's interior, burned through the crust and erupted onto the surface as lava.

  5. Easter Island from Space Today, volcanic cones are found at each point of the island. The largest, Rano Kau is easily visible from space. The highest is Terevaka, which rises to 11674 feet above sea level. There are over 70 eruptive centers on the island but none has known activity since the island was colonized 1300 years ago.

  6. STATUE CONSTRUCTION • The soft volcanic tuff was perfect material for statue carving. • The production of the statues was most likely through conscripted labor with many rituals and ceremonies performed throughout the process. • Finally when a statue was finished, it was broken off its keel and slid carefully down the slope .

  7. The Fall of the Moai The first westerners to discover the island wondered how any one could have survived on such a desolate, treeless place. A chilling story of resource exploitation and destruction on Easter Island is beginning to come to light.

  8. Apparently the islanders were greeted with a lush tropical paradise when they first discovered it. It must have seemed inexhaustible. The trees were cut for lumber for housing, wood for fires, and eventually for the rollers and lever-like devices used to move and erect the moai. With the loss of the forests, the land began to erode. The small amount of topsoil quickly washed into the sea. The crops began to fail and the clans turned on one another in a battle for the scarce resources. The symbols of the islanders' power and success, the moai, were toppled.

  9. Eventually all pure Rapa Nui blood died out. Annexation with Chile brought new influences, and today there are only a few individuals left with ties to the original population.

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