What Kentucky and Egypt Have in Common Changes Everything About Giza

The bedrock of the Giza Plateau is predominantly Eocene limestone - the same carbonate based rock that underlies the cave-dense terrain of Tennessee and Kentucky. Randall establishes that connection deliberately. Limestone dissolves in acidic water. That is not a geological footnote - it is the physical mechanism behind some of the most dramatic subterranean landscapes on Earth, and Randall is building toward the same question applied to Egypt. Mixed into the Giza bedrock are dolomites, also calcium carbonate based, along with smaller quantities of sandstone and marls - but to considerable depths, the mass of what lies beneath the plateau is soluble limestone.

The question Randall is positioning is one of climate. The Sahara, Egypt, and neighboring Libya present as hyper-arid desert today - but that has not always been the case. If the limestone bedrock beneath Giza was once exposed to the kind of sustained acidic water contact that produces cave systems in Tennessee and Kentucky, the implications for what lies beneath the plateau are significant. A bedrock that dissolves under the right climatic conditions, combined with a region that geological and archaeological evidence suggests was once dramatically wetter, points toward a subterranean landscape beneath Giza that the current desert surface gives no indication of - and that Randall suggests has barely begun to be examined.