60 Minutes - 2/9/2020: Ultra Deep, Fly Like an Eagle, Easter Island

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

On this week's "60 Minutes," Bill Whitaker finds out what lies 2 miles below Earth's surface. Scott Pelley goes hunting with eagles in Mongolia, and Anderson Cooper reports on Easter Island's moai statues. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side, or B-side, or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Tonight on this special edition of 60 Minutes Presents, Great Adventures. Travel as deep into the earth as man has ever traveled, two miles down, to get to the veined rock that becomes this, liquid molten gold.

But gold's not all. Scientists have found something else down here, something known as extreme life, which might also exist on Mars. So the Martians we meet in the future, be prepared to be surprised, I would say. In Mongolia, hunters partner with eagles in a tradition that goes back thousands of years. One of the best at this is Lauren McGow from, of all places, Oklahoma City. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like

something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. We built a camera harness to learn what it's like to fly like an eagle. These giant stone statues have fascinated and confounded visitors for centuries. Dutch explorers named this place almost 300 years ago when they spotted it on Easter Sunday. It has soul. It has life. They're alive. Absolutely. In the middle of the Pacific, Easter Island is very difficult for most people to reach until tonight. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans,

you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4.

New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Good evening. I'm Bill Whitaker.

Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. Tonight, three great adventures. We'll soar with eagles high above Mongolia, then cruise across the Pacific to visit Easter Island. We begin our adventures with a trip deep below ground. Over the years at 60 Minutes, we have been in more than a few tunnels. We explored Mexican drug lord El Chapo's subterranean escape routes, burrowed through a Roman villa buried by Mount Vesuvius, and traveled the depths of the New York City subway. But nothing prepared us for a place

called Moab Katsong, a South African gold mine that extends nearly two miles beneath the surface. As we first reported in 2018, in their pursuit of gold, South Africans have dug the deepest holes on Earth. The country was the world's top gold producer for decades. Now the gold is running out, just as these ultra-deep mines have attracted a new breed of miner on a very different quest, we went along for the adventure. In the early morning light, tall mine shafts loom over the Val River Basin two hours southwest of Johannesburg.

This once was a booming gold field. Now, most mines lie abandoned. But Moab Katsong is bustling. Long before the sun rises, thousands of miners start lining up for the triple-deck elevator called The Cage. It's jammed, but more always push on. And early one morning, so did we. It's really snug in here. We are packed in as tight as sardines. The electric bells signal we're ready. And the cage drops, slowly at first,

then picks up speed fast. We plunge 450 stories straight down. It's the longest elevator ride on Earth. This is fast. Really fast. 50 stories straight down. It's the longest elevator ride on Earth. The cage rattles and whistles as we descend. The air gets more humid the deeper we go. Our lifeline to the surface is a machine called the manwinder. Massive coils of steel rope two inches thick that attach to the cage and unspooled faster and faster.

We dropped two miles in a couple of minutes and emerged in an underground city. This is like Grand Central Station in Russia. To get to the goal, miners must walk miles through a vast maze of dimly lit tunnels. Sometimes you're lucky and can catch a ride. But mostly, you just walk. For Leroy Lee, it's in the blood. His father worked in the mines. Now it's his turn.

His family depends on his job. It's four, six people. It's my kids, my wife, my parents actually, and my mother, my sister. The gold in these ultra-deep mines is found in narrow veins laced through the rock. Some are no wider than a pencil. It's cramped at the rock face, and we crouch alongside the miners as they work hunched over in the dark. The noise from the drills is deafening. Massive air conditioners cool the tunnels, but it can still reach 120 degrees down here. At the end of the shift, we had to rush not to miss the elevator back up. It doesn't wait for anyone. And here's where all that breaking rock pays off, the smelter. The ore is smashed and pulverized in

a grinder before being fed into a furnace. Manga Kasango, who runs the operation, told us we were the first TV crew to film the weekly ritual they call the pour. We all had to wear these special pajamas with no pockets so we couldn't steal anything. The heat was intense as the furnace reached almost 2,000 degrees. The gold turned to liquid and poured down into the molds. When I saw it the first time, I was like, wow. That's something that keeps me going on that. When you hear people who have never seen gold or touched it, I feel like I'm more privileged. These bars will be refined again to 99.99%

purity before they're sold for coins and jewelry. The mine used to process about 60 tons of gold a year. Now it's just a quarter of that. Still, the day we watched the pour, there was a pretty good haul. Wow. This is quite heavy. Yes, it is. How much is this? 11 million rand. In U.S. dollars, we're talking seven and a half to eight million U.S. dollars for what you poured today. Yes, definitely. That sounds like a good day. It's a good business.

It's one thing to come here for the gold. But now this harsh environment has attracted others, scientists hunting for what they call extreme life. We found water that's a billion years old. A billion years old. A billion years old. In these caves. Right. An international team led by Princeton geoscientist Tullis Anstott

and Belgian biologist Gaetan Bourgoni are pioneers in the search for life buried in the rock where no one thought it could survive. Bourgoni says his colleagues thought he was crazy when he took a sabbatical to try to prove there was life deep underground. Oh, come on, they said, you're going to go to South Africa for a year. You're going to look for something that does not exist there. They've lost count of the number of trips to the bottom of the mine searching for life hidden in the ancient water seeping through the rock.

This is a completely different world down there. There are different rules. How so? The temperature is different, the pressure is different. I mean, it's a tough world down there for life. The next day, we went along with them to the deepest level of the mine. For them, it was just another day at the office. For us, it was an eye-opener.

This feels like that movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth. With just the light from our headlamps, we waded through a tunnel that had been flooded with cold water to cool it down. Then we grabbed a chairlift cut through a channel of rock, except this one went down. This is like the best Disney ride ever. Picture five of New York's World Trade Centers stacked on top of each other.

That's how deep in the earth we are. We're stopped for a second. I hope it's a second. We have to get off? Yeah. When the chairlift stopped suddenly, we had to hike down the last 50 yards to the bottom. Then, at the end of an abandoned tunnel,

our scientists found something amazing. I've been looking for 20 years for a salty water deposit like this, and never found it until now. White patches on the wall turned out to be salt. Is that edible? I don't know. I just tried it. This is ancient salt? That's the question. It has to it? What's salt? This is ancient salt? That's the question. It has to be. It's very, very salty. And the source?

This dripping salt water. What does that tell you? It tells me this water is extremely old, because in these rock formations, they were formed three billion years ago. There weren't salt deposits back then. They believe this water could be all that's left of an ancient ocean. And where there's water, there can be life.

We could be looking at something which has never seen the life that has evolved on the surface of the planet. All from this cave two miles down in South Africa. All from gold mines in South Africa. Exactly. In 2011, they found what no one thought possible. These tiny worms living in a pocket of water 5,000 years old. What you're seeing is magnified. These worms are no bigger than a human hair. It was a species never before seen. It survives without sunlight, deep in the hot underworld. So they called it Mephisto, or the devil.

That's where my worms live. They eat bacteria. The first worm you found was in something like that? Yeah. Using an endoscope camera, they were the first to film this deep inside the Earth's crust. This is the devil worm's home. Before this, no one thought animal life could exist this deep. You made a big discovery. For me, it is big because, for me personally,

I had to fight quite a lot of people to be able to do this. On a personal level, that was the biggest victory for me. In the total grand scheme of things, it's just a worm. It's just a worm. It's just a worm. They were surprised to find other living creatures, too. So many, they called them a zoo, a crustacean, about one-sixty-fourth of an inch, an arthropod, a flatworm, and single-cell bacteria. It set off a storm of speculation about where else

extreme life might exist, perhaps even on Mars. NASA helped fund their research. If there is life here in the deep, then you should definitely dig on Mars because if life was ever there, you will find some life form, I believe very strongly, still on Mars. So the Martians we meet in the future could be these single cell organisms you're talking about? Yes, indeed. I think that would be the most likely. But be prepared to be surprised, I would say. South Africa's gold mines are now so deep they might as well be on another planet. I'm not sure that we really want to send human beings much deeper. Bernard Swanepoel started his career underground and ended it as the CEO of Harmony Gold,

which now owns Moab Katsong. If you are in a successful mining team, it must be like a successful sports team. I mean, mining is one of those activities where at the end of every shift, you know whether you won or lost. Gold was the lifeblood of South Africa. The way it's dug out has changed little since apartheid, when underpaid black miners often worked in mortal danger. At its worst, more than 800 workers a year died in mining accidents. No coincidence, the struggle that led to apartheid's defeat started underground. Gold and gold mining seem to be in the DNA of South Africa. South African gold mining especially has always been at the center of

all political and other activities in our country. I mean, how bad apartheid history is intertwined with gold mining. I mean, a lot of the legislation to dispossess black people of land was in order to create cheap labor for South African gold mines. You grew up in a small mining town during the era of apartheid. What are your strongest memories? Well, ultimately, I'm a privileged person that because I was white and I was male, those were the two requirements at the time to become a mining engineer. So are you the new face of South African mining? I would say yes. We are the new generation in the mining.

Just a dozen years after apartheid ended, engineer Manga Kasango started managing the smelter. He told us he chose to move here from the Congo to work in the mines. Has that wound in South Africa been healed? Not 100% healed, but there's some healing happening. There's some healing, yes, because we have different people working in the mines, and the mindset has been changing. Now, safety is paramount. You will find women underground, and blacks are senior managers. Once, some of the lowest-paid laborers are now among the highest. But this generation of gold miners know they may be the last.

Of the 11 gold mines that once flourished around here, only three still operate. The mines are now so deep it's becoming too expensive to get the gold out. The story of the ultra-deep mines is nearing its final chapter. To dig the riches from such astounding depths took grit and brute force. Now South Africa's resolve must be deployed to solving the next challenge. What to do when the gold runs out. Sometimes, historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping, history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the

1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Falconry, the art of hunting with birds of prey, was born in the forbidding Altai Mountains of Central Asia. As we first told you last year, hunters there still loft golden eagles into the sky in a partnership of man and bird that predates recorded history. We say man, but in truth, one of the best hunters in Mongolia today is a woman from Oklahoma City. Lauren McGow took Scott Pelley to one of the most remote places on Earth to meet the hunters who trained her.

And before the next few minutes are through, you will know what it's like to fly like an eagle. The Mongolian steppe is the greatest expanse of grassland unaltered by humankind. It endures because human existence has narrow odds between the widest climate extremes on Earth, 104 degrees in summer, 50 below in winter. Nomads depend on the animals that yield nearly all of their food, fiber, clothing, and fuel. And one of the oldest bonds in nature is an alliance of survival among hunters, horses, and golden eagles.

This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. This is where it all began. It's the cradle. So several thousand years ago, we don't know precisely when a man saw an eagle catch a rabbit or a fox and had the ingenious idea to hunt in partnership with it. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. Lauren McGow was in high school when she dedicated her life to raptors. She traveled with us to the place she calls the cradle. Karen McGough was in high school when she dedicated her life to raptors. She traveled with us to the place she calls the Cradle.

6,000 miles led us first to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. This civilization conquered the known world in the 13th century. The Mongols ranged from Asia to Europe, the largest contiguous empire of all time. From here, we flew another 800 miles to Bayan Olgi, where Mongolia, Russia, China, and Kazakhstan meet. This was the end of the road, but not the end of our journey. We crossed the open steppe, past wild Bactrian camels with two humps, a vanishing species with only about 1,000 left in the world. Our destination was a camp of nomads, people who introduced Lauren McGow to the Golden Eagle. Hello! They hadn't seen her in two years.

Deja! Feels like I never left. Just in a few minutes of seeing everybody. Such a magical place. Now, how did a woman from Oklahoma end up out here in Mongolia? Well, I read a book on falconry and it's like the fire was lit. I just knew I had to do it. And as I was researching, I went to the library and I found this old book that had black and white photos of eagle hunters from Mongolia. So, you know, this beautiful

shaggy horse and this man with a giant eagle and a fox pelt on his horse, and it just looked like the most incredible thing. And I thought, I have to, I have to see it. I have to do it. At the age of 17, her father, a former Air Force stealth pilot, brought her to Mongolia. Lauren returned five years later with funding from a Fulbright scholarship. Then she earned a Ph.D. based on her work with the eagle hunters. These are the people that can talk to animals because they have relationships with goats, sheep, horses, camels, eagles. They have intimate knowledge of where snow leopards are and foxes are. There's no agriculture here because the land's not arable. So they've ingeniously learned to domesticate animals and then build these unique relationships with wild animals.

It's a relationship that she learned from people who endure the life of 19th century ranchers. They are Kazakhs who make up just 4% of Mongolians. They have no running water, no electricity. They survive on meat and milk and burn dung as fuel. The nomads live in clusters of a half dozen families or so. The boys mine the flocks while the men ride in search of foxes to make furs for Sub-Zero's survival. In all the years you've been doing this, what have you learned about these animals? A hunter named Chukan gave us an answer we never saw coming. As they said in the old times, if the horse makes your name famous in a race

once a year, the eagle makes your name famous a hundred times a year. If I gift to people many foxes, they will say it was Chukan who gifted us the foxes. Eagle hunting is more about your name being spread far and wide among the people. So, if eagle hunting is about the ego of men, we wondered how they saw Lauren McGough. She had her mind set on learning to hunt with the eagle. Her motivation came from deep in her heart. We just couldn't say no. When Lauren first came to Mongolia, it took her two weeks to catch an eagle she could call her own. How do you catch a golden eagle?

Yes, so you have a dead hair that you lay out with a crow or a raven staked nearby, and you encircle it in a net. So the eagle, on migration, looks down and sees this hare that only a crow has possession of, and it thinks, I can easily bully that crow out of that rabbit and have a free meal to myself. So it comes in, and when it tries to grab the dead rabbit, the net unfolds around the eagle. The eagle is taught to feed at the hand of the hunter,

and as long as the meals are regular, the eagles are calm, content, and come back for more. They perch on the hunter's arm with a rawhide leash called a jess tied to their legs. They train the birds with a fox pelt tugged by a rope. This is what happens when the eagle zeroes in on a fox. After the bird makes the kill, the hunters ride in, strip the pelt, and give the meat to the eagle. It's a technique well over a thousand years old. We may not know exactly when it started, but you don't have to be here in Mongolia very long to figure out why it began. In an area as vast as this, with game so rare, it helps to have a hunting partner that can see seven times better than a human and cover all of this at about 50 miles an hour.

What is that like? The eagles were kind enough to show us. We custom built a soft rubber camera harness and learned how to fly. Golden eagles are abundant all around the northern hemisphere. In terms of survival as a species, conservationists call golden eagles an animal of least concern. This is a 10-pound bird, which don't be fooled if that doesn't sound like a lot. They have hollow bones and they're mostly feathers, so 10 pounds on a bird is an enormous bird they have a six foot wingspan they usually have lovely amber eyes and the name golden eagle derives from the

beautiful golden feathers on their nape and then the around the neck yes around the neck they're incredibly effective at killing which is what they're built for. I mean, they're a modern-day velociraptor, a perfect product of evolution. I will never be tired of a golden eagle flying. Every time, it thrills me. The eagle's talons can close on its prey with a bone-crushing force of 900 pounds per square inch. A fun fact that is no fun to know. Come on, sweetheart. Perfect.

Okay. Very good. And then go ahead and stand up. And then to secure the eagle, place your jesses between your thumb and the rest of your fingers. Right here. Yes. Okay.

The noise that the eagle recognizes is caw, caw. Okay, all right. Whenever you're ready, just take off her hood. Remove the hood? Yes. Caw, caw, caw. Good girl. What a feeling.

Notice she said, good girl. The only eagles worthy of partnership are female. They're larger, stronger, better hunters. Ironic, since the human partner is traditionally male. Of all the eagle hunters you've known, how does Lauren rate? How good is she? She is at the same level as men. She could compete with them. Lauren, at 32, is considered

one of the best falconers in the world. She has brought the ancient ways to Oklahoma, where she rehabilitates raptors and trained with her own eagle named Miles. What is the career of one of these eagles? So an eagle is trapped first year, second year, maybe third year on its migration. And then it has a time with an eagle hunter, which could be as short as a year or as long as six, seven, eight years. Eventually, they return that eagle back to the wild. It is part of the tradition to let them go? Yes. They firmly believe that an older eagle should be in the wild. What do you say to some people who might watch this and think that the eagles are being abused, that they shouldn't be caught?

I would encourage anybody that has doubts to go out with a falconer. In this country or in the United States or anywhere, we only encourage their natural instincts. The only difference is you are right there. You have a front row seat to see this incredibly million-year-old predator-prey relationship. Do you worry that one day there will be no more eagle hunters? A hunter named Uni told us, no, it's an essential art that Kazakhs are born with. Since Kazakhs have come to the earth, they have been practicing this tradition. It will not disappear. Also, each of us has a young person that we teach, like this boy. It passes from generation to generation.

What's at stake if this tradition is lost? This is where man first figured out that he could have a relationship with a raptor. And what a loss would it be for humanity if it was gone? We can take an individual eagle and bring it from the spectrum of wild all the way to tame and then wild again. And we get to see what they're capable of up close and in person. Man, if that understanding of eagles and animals were to leave, that's not a world I want to live in. The boy, named Becca, is the hope of his family's traditional world. He's learning horsemanship and falconry. And it was with Becca that we discovered the most endangered species on the steppe, the nomads themselves. There may be only 300 eagle hunters

left, a rare breed of human still speaking the language of the wild. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Now we take you on a journey to Easter Island. It's one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world.

Far into the Pacific, 2,200 miles due west from the coast of Chile. Dutch explorers gave it its name after they spotted it on Easter Sunday in 1722. What they found has fascinated and confounded the world ever since. Giant stone statues that tower over the island's landscape. They're called moai, and as Anderson Cooper first reported last spring, there is nothing quite like them anywhere else in the world. When dawn breaks on Easter Island, it is the moai that first feel the sun. These 15 moai at a site called Tongariiki are perhaps the most famous.

Carved out of volcanic rock, they're placed on a stone platform called an ahu. The tallest is nearly 30 feet. They stand, strange, silent sentinels facing away from the sea, watching over the land and its people. At least 1,000 Moai can be found scattered across this island, which is about the size of Washington, D.C. Many more Moai remain buried underground. To the descendants of those who built them, these are more than statues made of stone. They are immortal branches of an ancient family tree. The Moai represent an ancestor, and we believe in ancestor that goes beyond this life,

but is helping us, guiding you. Is a Moai a distinct individual ancestor, or can it also be the family line of that ancestor? Both. Pedro Edmonds Paoa is the longtime mayor of the only town on Easter Island. So when you see the Moai today, it's not just something from the past, it's something that is alive, that has power right now. Yes, we indigenous people from this island believe in that. The indigenous people here believe their ancestors and family lines are represented by specific groups of Moai.

Mayor Edmunds Paoa says his are at a site called Tahai. My genealogy traces all the way to that site 85 times. It goes back that far? Yes, more than a thousand years. That is entirely possible. No one knows for sure the exact date the first people came here, but it's believed to have been somewhere around 800 to 1200 years ago. Archaeological evidence indicates they sailed from an unknown island in Polynesia,

a dangerous journey across more than a thousand miles of open ocean. Those first settlers brought with them their tradition of carving, but they made much smaller statues. They also brought a belief in a mystical force called mana. How do you describe mana? What is mana? Mana is beyond description. If we were to describe it of today's language, it's knowledge. Knowledge.

It could be interpreted as wisdom, as an energy that gives you strength. Do the Moai still have mana? Sure. It has soul. It has life. They're alive? Absolutely. According to legend, when important islanders died, their mana flowed out of their bodies into the Moai. The mana is here. The mana is here. It's a hard concept for my small mind to imagine.

For a human like you guys from the city don't understand these things. Because you worry about working like disciplined animals. Those who believe in mana say it's not just in the Moai. It can be found in everything here. In the waves that constantly crash ashore, in the rocky soil, and in the green grass that blankets the island. These objects, in the middle of what looks like a barren landscape,

they speak to you. They draw you in. They make you want to know more. I think that that's the power of them. And when you see how tall they really are... Joanne Van Tilburg is a UCLA professor of archaeology. She's been coming here for nearly 40 years, working with local researchers and artists,

excavating and cataloging the statues, trying to understand the mysteries and what she calls the magic of the Moai. They're tight-lipped, these statues. They don't give up their secrets easily. They don't give up their secrets easily. They don't give them up to outsiders easily. To learn the Moai's secrets, you have to start where nearly all of them were made, around the vent of a dormant volcano. This is the ancient quarry

of Rana Raraku. There are some 400 Moai here, more than in any other spot on the island. The largest one, never raised upright, is almost 70 feet long and weighs at least 250 tons, as heavy as some passenger jets. Based on excavations Joanne Van Tilburg and other archaeologists have done, an analysis of soil samples and objects found around the statues, Van Tilburg believes the height of Moai construction was around 1300 to the mid-1400s, though Moai did continue to be carved until, or just after, the first contact with Europeans in 1722. I mean, is it not possible with carbon dating

or other scientific techniques to know exactly when something is made? Unfortunately not. You can't date stone, this stone, in that manner. When the first archaeological survey was done on the island in 1914, all the Moai, except those in the quarry, were found lying on the ground. There are several plausible theories how they got there. Certain statues may have simply fallen from neglect. Others were knocked over in earthquakes, and some were intentionally toppled during fighting between competing family groups. Today, some Moai are only partially visible.

Just their famous faces stick out of the ground. The rest of their bodies are buried under sediment that's naturally built up over the centuries. This one is at least only about one-third above ground. Wow, so two-thirds of this are actually below ground. Yes, yes. At first glance, the moai all look alike, but Van Tilburg says no two are the same. How are they different? Well, they're different in the line of their mouth. They're different in, of course, their size and shape. They're different in their expressions, whether their head is tilted up or lowered slightly or to the side. These two moai, they're unfinished?

They're unfinished. Visitors here have long debated how the moai were made, given the Stone Age conditions on the island when the statues were being carved. Van Tilburg says the answer is all around. There are thousands of stone carving tools scattered throughout the quarry. This was a handheld instrument that was used, and if you hold it, you can actually feel where people may have put their fingers, which was actually used to rough out the sculpture.

You can actually feel the hand? Yeah, you can. Wow, that's amazing. This was literally just laying 10 feet away. And you put it in your hand, and you can feel where the other person's hand was who actually used this. When you talk about mystery and magic,

that's it right there. But magic alone couldn't move the Moai from the quarry to sites on the coast, in some cases more than eight miles away. That took muscle and ingenuity. Van Tilburg has tested a theory she believes, that Moai were placed horizontally on sleds and dragged over logs. Island legend says the statues walked, and some archaeologists have tested that theory as well, moving them upright, carefully wobbling them back and forth. You may have also heard an out-of-this-world theory about space aliens making and moving the Moai.

It may sound ridiculous, but it's still believed by many visitors today. You must have people asking you about extraterrestrials building these. Yes, I do. So, I mean, I just have to ask, any possibility of that? You don't believe it, though? No, I don't believe it. Easter Island was annexed by Chile in 1888. Half of the 8,000 people who now live here are Chilean immigrants. The other half are modern descendants of those original Polynesian settlers.

They call themselves and the island Rapa Nui. In 2017, Chile finally gave them control of the national park where the Moai and other important archaeological sites are located. The park covers more than 40% of the island. The island of Rapa Nui was formed out of volcanic rock starting some 3 million years ago. There are now three dormant volcanoes that dominate the landscape. This one is called Ranocal. No one knows exactly how many archaeological sites there are on the island, but this place is like a living museum, constantly battered by the

sun, the wind, and the rain. Those three elements are, over time, destroying the Moai. These statues may look as though they're solid stone, but they're actually quite porous. Joanne Van Tilburg showed us a small piece of the soft volcanic rock called tuff that the Moai are made from. Tuff has really special qualities that where it can be carved and it can be polished quite easily. It's good for sculpting because it's with a harder stone, it's able to be chipped away. Correct. Correct. So the very material which made these statues possible also long term-term makes them very vulnerable. Exactly.

Rainwater and airborne seeds get into the pores of Tuff, gradually breaking it apart. The wind whittles the stone away over time, and further damage is done by birds and an organism called lichen. Some moai are in worse condition than others. Take a look at this one called Tukuturi. This photograph is from 1955 when it was unearthed. This is how Tukuturi looks today. The stone breaks very easily. It is just not stable. Essentially, I mean, they're dissolving. Yeah, they are. I mean, if they're standing out in the rain, they're melting like sugar cubes. Like sugar cubes in the rain. Exactly. It's that dramatic. In the 1990s, with help from the Japanese government, the 15 moai at Tongariiki,

which had fallen or been toppled over, were reconstructed, along with a stone platform they now stand on. The UN has declared Easter Island a World Heritage Site, and efforts to slow the disintegration of the statues with a chemical sealant have been underway for decades. But so far, only about 20 moai have been treated. The process is expensive, money the island doesn't have. It's also not a permanent solution. The sealant only delays the inevitable. One day, these moai will likely disappear. Is there a plan, a conservation plan, an environmental plan for long term in the future?

No. There's none? None. None at all. Mayor Pedro Edmonds' Paoa is frustrated. There's a lack of consensus among the Rapa Nui about how to preserve the moai. And the island's infrastructure is under pressure from all the tourists who want to come see the statues. A few decades ago, there were only two incoming flights a week.

Now there are two almost every day. Cruise ships also make regular calls, just long enough for passengers to get off the boat, grab some souvenirs, and snap a few selfies. In all, 120,000 tourists visited last year. That's too much. If tourism continues to grow, is that sustainable here? No, it's not sustainable. Christian Moreno-Paccarati is a historian

who earns his living training tour guides. Do you have concerns about the impact of tourism? So in material terms, the community has never been better. But in general, it's much less friendly than it was some time ago. He says the more the island caters to tourists, the less like home it is for the people whose ancestors built the Moai. Today we are kind of forced to see the statues from far away, just like the tourists that come here. People of my generation, right? We could go there

and touch the statues and be part of the statues and hug the statues. How can I explain to my son today that my son cannot do that? Despite no longer being able to touch them, he still feels the same sense of wonder he's always experienced when visiting the Moai. You've been here probably thousands of times. A thousand times, yeah. No, it's still awesome. It's something that you still feel awe when you're here. Christian Moreno-Paccarati supports the efforts to preserve the Moai,

but believes it'll take more than mana and money. He has his own somewhat radical idea on how to ensure the Moai keep standing. The only way to keep them alive is to keep alive the art of making and moving statues. So you would like to see the people of Rapa Nui making new Moai? That's right, because these will disappear one day. So if the art of making them is still alive, we will never lose the statue. I'm Bill Whitaker. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with a brand new edition of 60 Minutes.