Field work, laboratory work, writing reports, and teaching are all part of a day’s work for Dr. Beverly Goodman, an underwater coastal geo-archeologist of the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa. For Goodman, this is the ideal career. Goodman’s most recent finding is the first physical evidence of a tsunami on the coast of Israel, specifically in Caesarea. Her research team encountered the initial deposit by chance during their excavations of offshore shipwrecks at an ancient port in Caesarea. “(The team) had too much time left to call it quits and we didn’t have enough time left to go on to the next site. So we thought, okay, what are we? We are geo-archeologists, let’s keep digging. And it’s a good thing we did,” says Goodman. A Tsunami deposit is made up of the debris the Tsunami picked up in its path. Afterwards, the debris falls out of the water column and leaves a signature behind. The appearance and contents of a Tsunami deposit vary based on the distance of the deposit from the shore. The deposit Goodman found was a meter thick and contained remnant of shell, rock and pottery. “If I am doing coring, then sometimes we actually live on the research ship itself. It’s really nice because we wake up and we’re already at work,” Goodman says. Because she works underwater, there isn’t much time during the work day to discuss the team’s progress. The team wants the dive to go as smoothly as possible so the entire project is planned in advance so they can make the most of the field time. Everybody on Goodman’s team has a high level SCUBA certification and extensive diving experience. “The diving we do isn’t standard recreational diving; we are working with some technical diving gear which allows us to work a lot longer and also gives us the freedom to work in deeper water,” says Goodman. Their gear includes cameras that allow the researchers to see what is happening underwater from above, and a radio communication system between the divers and the ship so they can report any problems. Usually the field work lasts 2-4 weeks, and afterwards the team works on getting all the research to the lab and beginning the process of analyzing the data. The analysis is a slow process, but the initial review of the cores is immediate. Once the cores are opened, Goodman can tell if there are any good layers to examine. Some of the sample is sent off to a lab to be analyzed by radio carbon dating, a process that can date organic material. Sometimes a sample can be dated by the pottery found in the core since certain types of pottery can give a more exact date. Goodman uses a microscope to analyze the sediment, to see the character of the material. Remains of animals found in the samples can be an indication of the type of environment they lived in. “For example, there are certain types of animals that only live in the shallows. If you find them in a very deep position, you know that they have been moved there. These are some of the ways that we can identify tsunami events,” Goodman says. “When you are putting all the results together, there is an incredible feeling of bringing together all these results and all this data. After all this work, seeing a nice clear four page article is also a very exciting part of my career. I really do love my job. It’s a lot of fun,” Goodman adds. The locations for research are chosen based on information about what is on the coastline, either from historical texts or from archeological excavations. “I also love the mystery and the excitement when we first open up a core, and we don’t know what is in it or what we are going to encounter. A core is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get,” Goodman quips. Goodman is going to continue working in Israel. She hopes to take a few more core samples in other areas that have a history in texts of tsunami events but no physical evidence. She will use this information to determine how big they were and whether they were local events, or if they affected the whole coast of Israel. In the future, this research will be used to create models of this tsunami and compare it to the deposits left behind by modern tsunamis. Goodman’s research is supported by The Ministry of Infrastructure, Hebrew University, The Inter-university Institute for Marine Sciences, National Geographic, and the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences at Haifa University. The goal of Goodman’s research is to facilitate accurate predictions of the scope of the damage that can be expected in the event of a future tsunami. Click here to download a recent interview with Dr. Beverly Goodman on Israel National Radio.
