So now Malta’s cabinet ministers are geologists

My column in The Malta Independent today is about how ridiculous those four cabinet ministers were yesterday to give a joint press conference about Malta’s invasion of Libya…well, actually about the collapse of a natural rock formation.

We’re not interested in what even one of them has to say about it, let alone all four – Jose Herrera (Environment), Edward Zammit Lewis (Tourism), Anton Refalo (Gozo) and Noddy ta’ Janice (Kultura) – so this morning I rang a geologist who had actually studied the situation four years ago for a report about the effect of explosives used in the Inland Sea.

I asked Peter Gatt, the geologist, whether he thinks those explosives were the cause of it, but he said he doesn’t think so and it was going to happen anyway. People appear to believe that the top of the arch was the problem (the “roof”), he said, but that was actually quite stable and would have survived another 10 to 15 years.

The problem was the “pillar” supporting the “roof” – that pillar collapsed and brought the whole thing down. Wave erosion above sea level was bad enough, Dr Gatt said, but the worst of it will have been below sea level where it’s not immediately visible. “So what you have is an increasingly weakened and narrowed piece of rock that finally reaches the point where it can no longer support the weight above.”

I asked him what he thinks about all this talk of “rebuilding” it. He laughed. “If they’re talking about picking all the rocks out of the sea and sticking them together, that’s obviously out of the question. And if they have the money to splash around on making a fibreglass replica, then the issues are otherwise.”