INTRODUCTION A LONG FORGOTTEN WALL An ancient atlas held a clue that British researcher William Lindesay couldn't resist It showed a section of a wall in the Gobi Desert region of southern Mongolia Locally it was known as the Wall of Genghis after the once powerful Mongolian leader Khan Genghis
Lindesay had been curious about the wall since 1997 when a friend gave him the atlas that had been written in the twelfth century Lindesay had a suspicion that the wall wasn't actually Mongolian at all Lindesay contacted an expert on Mongolian geography Professor Baasan Tudevin who had traveled throughout the Gobi Desert He had seen different structures there and suggested using Google Earth to locate the wall Amazingly in the Google Earth images Tudevin and Lindesay saw a thin black line where the atlas showed wall the
DIGGING FOR CHINA Lindesay wondered if this could be a section of China's Great Wall He knew that sections of the wall came close to the border between Mongolia and China and that this border had not always been clearly defined He also knew that the wall's beginning and end are unknown Many of its sections are crumbling and deteriorated so they hardly look like walls at all In August 2011 Lindesay led an expedition into the desert to find the wall and determine if it was Chinese or not On the second day the team found the wall It was shoulder high in some places and ran for 62 miles hazik a KAHIT He ETTER 25 William Lindesay
DIG DEEP Lindesay's team took wood from the section of the Great Wall they found to try to determine when it was built They used radiocarbon dating a method that compares an object's levels of carbon 14 and carbon 12 two kinds of atoms found inside living things While something is alive the atoms have a certain ratio When it dies carbon 14 begins to decay but carbon 12 does not By analyzing the decay of carbon 14 scientists can make good guesses about how old an object is Lindesay's team found that the wood used in the wall was from 1040 to 1160 CE 100 kilometers through the desert and up an extinct volcano And much of the wall looked just like part of the Great Wall that stands in Gansu China How have parts of the wall survived for thousands of years What was the wall made of And where does the wall begin and end People have many questions about this incredible relic of the past And the Great Wall of China still has secrets reveal to
