When Microbes Attack… World Landmarks
Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 06.26.08 | 12:37 PM ET
Photo by gbaku via Flickr (Creative Commons).
Historical sites from the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the Parthenon in Athens are under siege from bacteria, which are blackening, cracking and defacing monuments, The New York Times reports. Can scientists stop them? Many are optimistic, others not so much. “We have to accept that at some moment [the monuments] will disappear,” said Thomas Warscheid, a geomicrobiologist based in Germany. “But we know a lot about how to conserve them for the next 20, 30 years.”