The statue was discovered on February 21 by volunteer scientists from three Chilean universities as part of a project to restore the wetlands in the crater. “This moai has great potential for scientific and naturalistic studies – it is a truly unique discovery as it was the first time a moai has been discovered in a lake in the Rano Raraku crater,” are according to writing Guardian messages from the indigenous Ma’u Henua community. (Early name for freshwater crater lakes.)

The devastating October fireSeveral of the statues in the area were damaged in a massive forest fire in October that spread over about 100 hectares, but the area around the extinct Rano Raraku volcano, where most of the total of about 1,000 statues on the island stood, was the hardest hit. Many of them are less burned, but more have “irreversible consequences“, said the island’s mayor at the time Pedro Edmunds Paoa.

“This moai lies in the center of a lake that began to dry up in 2018,” said the head of the Ma’u Henua community, which manages the Rapa Nui National Park, where the mentioned volcano is also located. “Interestingly, the lake was three meters deep for at least the last 200 or 300 years, which means that no man could have left the moai there during that time.” he added. They are now working to obtain funding for a more extensive study of the discovery, but “they do not intend to remove the statue from where it is“.

Since 1995 on the UNESCO listThese famous monolithic stone figures with elongated faces and no legs are mostly made of tuff, which consists of volcanic ash, fragments of crystals and igneous rocks. The island has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995, with most of the island protected as the Rapa Nui National Park. Easter Island is one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world. It is also known as Rapa Nui and lies 3,500 kilometers west of Chile, under which it has belonged since 1888.