Help us to save Petra

Ironically, the flooding that created the region’s canyons now threatens to fill them or erode away the human structures there. In fact one of the lower central, fully three-dimensional columns of el khazneh did collapse long ago and was skillfully replaced in 1960. Fractures across the region, worsened by weathering and seismicity, collect water leads to spalling, the freezing and thawing that widen cracks behind the rock faces, which in its turn eventually lead to popping the outer layers off.

As it has done to the walls of the tomb facade in the Outer Siq in Petra, creating a honeycombed pattern of cavities called tafoni. Photo below Studies sponsored by the World Heritage Center, part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which designated Petra as a World Heritage Site in 1985, showed that salt deposits from the irrigation systems and other water problems contributed to sandstone weathering and erosion.

In 2000 a group of advisors from the U.S. National Park Service, along with Jordanian stakeholders, laid out the organizational structure necessary to run Petra as a national park. In collaboration with the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, tourism groups, the Bedouins and nongovernmental organizations work began to implement the program. For now, the restoration and conservation projects completed for the region, listed by the Petra National Trust on its Web site, include rebuilt channels that once carried water through the Siq.