Showing up unannounced, I’d met Beverly Goodman in Eilat, the southernmost city in Israel where she is working as a marine researcher, doing something akin to underwater archeology. She was eager to accept me and my mom, who’d just come to Israel from Canada for a short holiday. Thinking I could merge travel with business, I’d popped into the IUI (the Eilat-based Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences) across from our hotel, doing research for my next newspaper articles. (I love the sea and anything connected to it.)
Beverly, a kind hostess, dropped whatever she was doing, and sweetly welcomed us to the centre, showing me and my mom around.
I’d taken an extra liking to Beverly because, I would learn, she was a Canadian. While Americans are pretty common in Israel, finding a Canadian is more rare, and like navigating to a beacon in the sea in the middle of the storm, I was drawn to her. Don’t get me wrong, I love Israel, but sometimes the intensity of it gets to you. That’s when it’s nice to run into someone from “home” who on the most basic level knows who are you, without much explaining. So that’s how I first met Beverly.
Smart, beautiful, talented, and an expert diver, I was impressed. Careful to promote other research at the marine centre before her own, she ran through a list of projects that Israeli and Jordanian university professors are working on. Most of them not stationed in Israel, fly down to Eilat for a week here and there, collect samples from the coral reef, or run experiments in the wet lab, while some of their research students stay behind.
Clues about ancient tsunamis
But out of all the projects that Beverly told me about, I found hers the most fascinating: she’d been working on excavating sediments collected from the sea outside the sea-sunken parts of the Roman city of Caesaria, not far from the coastal and modern day city of Tel Aviv. Due to the complication of boring down into the sea floor, this pioneer from Lake Superior would go on to develop a unique coring method that would allow her to collect layers of sediment throughout the ages and investigate it. One of Beverly’s hypotheses is that Caesaria was struck down by an ancient tsunami, and the cataclysmic effects of the impact on the ancient city, may have led to its demise. Looking through the core samples, Beverly can show you broken shells and such that would indicate a tumultuous event had struck the city.
I’d written a profile about her on ISRAEL21c, an online magazine (see Israel’s Freshest Face in Archeology Works Underwater), and would learn that not only me, but a National Geographic crew had been following Goodman’s work. I’d go on to see her on TV a few months ago, explaining her coring methods on a National Geographic program. (Read on to learn more about the award the media mogul just gave her).
Here are some excerpts from the article I wrote about her: Goodman is one of a dozen researchers around the world exploring a new field known roughly as geo-archeology, she says, but even Goodman stumbles a bit coming up with a precise definition. While methods to core the ocean floor abound, there are few techniques suitable for collecting cores in sandy upper shelf environments, such as those found at Caesarea. In some ways it is easier to take coring samples at deep depths, and more difficult in shallow regions, explains Goodman.
“When cores are collected, we lower a tube and, using the force of gravity, run weights that slam the pipe into the ground. But the upper shelf we are working on typically consists of sand. It is reworked sand from the Nile. If you try to use the gravity core it bounces off the sand. The nature of the material changes,” she explains.
To collect the core from the shallow depths Goodman and her team refined a new technique using a pneumatic hammer attached by an adapter to an aluminum pipe, and balanced by way of lines attached to counter-floats.”Prior to this there was no method to core underwater at these depths,” she says. “No one did it really until now.”
Working in a wetsuit
The layers are inspected above shore. Each line, read like the ring of a tree, can include sediment from the sea as well as layers of broken shells, which may point to a force of nature hitting the shores, such as a tsunami. “The coastal area is an area of change. Of movement,” she says. “It is an interface with a dramatic expression of environmental change worldwide.”
Goodman knows about water and the forces of nature. She grew up on the shores of Lake Superior at Whitefish Bay, 17 miles from where the legendary freighter, the Edmund Fitzgerald, floundered and then sank. “As much as I love the shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, Israel is different,” she says. “Israel has been a crossroads forever. The time scale is so long. We can get a historical and pre-historical perspective from a long view, while being connected to well-known historical events.”
Up until now, Goodman explains, people who were studying climatic events and changes at sea relied on offshore deposits. “Even in research from the Indian Ocean, all of it involves transects that stop at the water line,” says Goodman. “This is the extent of the records.”
Goodman’s interest to go deeper by merging geology and archeology underwater was a natural extension of her love of science, human cultures and nautical history. She is currently completing her post-doctoral research with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but works out of the IUI.
A National Geographic Explorer
This week, to my excitement, I’d received a notice from my editor Nicky at ISRAEL21c that Goodman, my favourite underwater archeologist, had won an award. The Canadian-Israeli was awarded $10,000 by National Geographic and is “one of 10 visionary young trailblazers from around the world,” National Geographic writes.
The program recognizes and supports uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists, photographers and storytellers making a significant contribution to world knowledge through exploration while still early in their careers. Introduced in this month’s issue of National Geographic magazine, you can also see a web feature of Beverly and her cohorts at http://www.nationalgeographic.com.
“National Geographic’s mission is to inspire people to care about the planet, and our Emerging Explorers are outstanding young leaders whose endeavors further this mission. We are pleased to support them as they set out on promising careers. They represent tomorrow’s Edmund Hillarys, Jacques Cousteaus and Dian Fosseys,” said Terry Garcia, National Geographic’s executive vice president for Mission Programs.
Like myself, Beverly too shares a big passion for Israel, and has taken much of where she’s come from in Canada (she from the stormy shores of Lake Superior, me Newmarket, Ontario) to make her dreams come true in the Middle East. She’d make Jacques Cousteau proud.
To read more about the marine research at the IUI in Eilat, at the Red Sea, see the IUI website by clicking here.
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