Iraq's Mosul dam is in trouble. Called the "world's most dangerous dam" and a concern ever since it went online 30 years ago, the dam, built on a "very poor” foundation of water-soluble minerals, is now falling apart. If (or when) this dam collapses, it will flood the nearby city Mosul in more than 70 feet of water and destroy ancient historical sites along with it. These sites include some of the capitals of the world's first true empires in the first millennium B.C. . All in all thousands of archaeological sites and heritage sites would be essentially wiped away by the flood, causing catastrophic destruction of not only land, but cultural heritage. Some of these sites have not even been properly investigated, and Jason Ur, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, says "We don't know exactly what we would be losing." The flooding would also lead to a huge silt deposit across the Tigris river basin, which would jumble the area's surface artifacts and surface "record" that archaeologists rely on to roughly determine the age and size of a site without excavation "The Kurds are asking 'What was our past like?' and the Sunnis and Shiites are doing the same," says Ur. "People form their national identities based on what came before them, so archaeology is going to be a part of that." The damage that the dam could cause would be highly detrimental to not only the current population of people in Mosul and its surrounding areas, but also to Iraq's future generations.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160302-Iraq-Mosul-Dam-Islamic-State-Archaeology-Nineveh-Nimrud-Assyria-ISIS-ISIL/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160302-Iraq-Mosul-Dam-Islamic-State-Archaeology-Nineveh-Nimrud-Assyria-ISIS-ISIL/