Geologists Just Found Out What Jordan’s Petra Actually Is

More than a million people a year stand on the sand in front of the Treasury at Petra, and every one of them is standing on the wrong floor. In this one I go through the tomb that radar found beneath their feet in 2024, twelve complete skeletons still lying where they were placed, one of them holding a ceramic vessel against its body. The part that gets me is why they survived at all, because almost every reachable tomb in Petra was emptied centuries ago, and these twelve were saved by the floods that buried the city. I will be honest, the detail I cannot shake is the Bedouin firing rifles up at the stone urn on top of the facade for hidden pharaoh's gold, when the real find was under their feet the whole time. The walls inside that chamber have also pulled back four centimetres in less than a century, not from desert weather but from people touching them.