Easter Island looks for help to save statues from 'leprosy'

White spots eating away at the sculptures are softening them to a clay-like consistency and deforming their features

Guardian staff and agencies
Fri 1 Mar 2019 20.31 GMT

Within a century the emblematic stone figures that guard remote Easter Island could be little more than weathered rectangular blocks, conservation experts are warning – but Britain could be part of the fix.

The giant heads, carved centuries ago by the island’s inhabitants, represent the living ancestors of Easter Island’s Polynesian people – the Rapa Nui – and have brought it Unesco world heritage site status in its Pacific location more than 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile.

But the hundreds of giant Moai statues dominating the hillsides are facing the threat of what locals ominously describe as a kind of “leprosy” – white spots that are appearing on the figures’ facades.

Caused by lichen, the patches are eating away at the sculptures, softening them to a clay-like consistency and deforming their features. The statues must also contend with coastal erosion, rising sea levels that will worsen with climate change, high winds and damage from freely roaming livestock, having withstood the elements for more than half a millennium.

“I imagine that in a century more these Moai will basically be rectangular figures,” Tahira Edmunds, the adviser to Chile’s National Forestry Corporation (Conaf), who has worked on cleaning the sculptures to remove the lichen, told Reuters during a visit to the island last month.

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