Saving Easter Island (pg. 3)

Kelsey and crew started by scanning the Moai in the Ranu Raraku quarry. "They're the icons of the island, and a lot of them are in really bad shape," Kelsey remembers deciding, "so let's focus on those." The team would start as early as 4 A.M., establishing GPS points for each statue and running the green lasers over all sides to capture every nook and cranny. A laser scan can capture as many as 250,000 points per second in mind-blowing detail. To demonstrate, Kelsey opens a 14-gigabyte scan on his laptop and zooms in to show the chisel marks where the statue was carved almost a millennium ago. "We were making submillimeter-accurate models in real time," he says. The scans effectively captured a moment in time, allowing researchers and planners to track erosion precisely and consider solutions - whether building overhangs for the Moai or buttressing a collapsing cliff.

The team traveled five hours on horseback to reach some destinations. They even packed the equipment on a boat and braved 12-foot swells to scan a tiny, unpopulated island nearby, once used as an obsidian mine. Metco VP Martin Dunn usually surveys nuclear power plants and automotive factories. This was different in ways he couldn't have imagined. "We scanned the inside of five caves and picked up petroglyphs. It wasn't what you'd call a profitable journey, but that experience is paying dividends," he says, noting that he's since scanned the Mayan ruins in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula.

After a week of 14-hour days, the scanning crew left for home, but Kelsey stayed on. He and a colleague used their planning software to design a civic center that the mayor had been agitating for. "We did in 90 minutes what they had been working on for a year and a half," Kelsey remembers. He arranged training classes for municipal workers - classes that continue to this day - showing them how to run simulations of water runoff during a heavy storm and demonstrating how reforestation efforts could retain topsoil. He also introduced new ideas about how medics could track disease, for example, or how taking into account the angle of sunlight during summer months would allow builders to decrease energy load. Then he showed his wares to the kids because he knew they'd be the key to getting the technology to stick. "I go to this class of fifth-graders, and they wouldn't let me leave," says Kelsey. "It was one of the greatest days of my career."

Late one morning, Haoa coaxes me into her four-wheel-drive and we head to her secluded home. Over the course of a week we've trudged into open fields where she's testing the effect of humidity, slope, and rock size on the growth of taro, a native root. It's simple experimentation. She tucks a leaf into a pile and revisits it periodically to check for progress. The plant may do well in one garden but flounder a hundred yards away, and she wants to know why. She has better luck in the greenhouse outside her home, where onions, grapes, pineapples, lettuce, hibiscus, and flowers all flourish without soil. Beyond her backyard we visit an alcove where eight-foot ferns sprout leaves as big as potbellied pigs. "Do you see those?" she asks, as if one could miss them. "It's the rocks that gave them the humidity to grow." This isn't just about unlocking an ancient way of life. Food remains expensive on Rapa Nui because most of it is shipped in. Rock gardens could offer the key to sustainable agriculture.

We stop at another unexpected bounty. As it turns out, the island isn't entirely bereft of the palm trees that once covered the land. A short drive from her home, Haoa shows me six stout palms in hiding. The biggest is about ten feet tall with a trunk like a wine barrel - appearing just sturdy enough to transport a giant Moai. Why isn't there a massive effort to reforest the island with native plants? "There's no money," she says, shaking her head.

There's not even any money left to fund her survey. As of 2009 the government has decided to sever Haoa's $60,000 annual grant. "They don't realize the importance," she says matter-of-factly. But she has good news. She tells me that Fred Olsen has swept in to save the day. Olsen is the patriarch and chairman of the vast Norwegian energy and cruise line conglomerate Fred Olsen & Co., and an archaeology enthusiast. Olsen knew of Haoa because of her work with his fellow countryman Heyerdahl.

Olsen traveled to Easter Island on his personal cruise ship last February, and before long he and Haoa were touring the South Pacific together, stopping at Pitcairn Island and various points on the way to New Zealand to study habitats. After the trip, Olsen decided to start a foundation with his youngest daughter to cover Haoa's costs and allow her to finish her life's work.

Olsen put up the money because he found a kindred spirit in Haoa - both are fond of putting together intellectual puzzles - and because she's unlocking the island's mysterious history. By uncovering more about her ancestors, Haoa stands to help modern civilizations facing similar fates, like Australia. "It's difficult to put your foot down without stepping on archaeology," he tells Fortune in a phone interview. "The goal is to do research into the past, but it's not just the past. Sonia has been incredibly keen on trying to protect the island. That's part of what we should be helping her to do."

As a self-respecting billionaire, Olsen naturally has a business idea in mind too. He thinks archaeology could become the basis for an export economy. Norway has oil and gas; Rapa Nui has statues. If that sounds like a stretch, consider that one of the island's 900 or so Moai will travel to the Louvre in the summer of 2010, a trip funded by French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. (To quiet any protest among natives, Haoa says every Rapanui has been offered a free trip to Paris.)

Olsen also has thoughts about the island's energy stream. He concedes that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. The future is renewables, so experimenting on the island could help him as much as it will help the natives. "We've been working to see if we can put up a couple of windmills," he says. "And it would be a fantastic place to test electric cars. There are some islands that can be self-sufficient once they get going. Easter Island is one of those places that could be totally green and perhaps build up again what the ancient people ruined."

With the specter of depleting natural resources around the globe, Easter Island seems a strong metaphor for a much bigger collapse. But Kelsey and Olsen no longer see it that way. By giving Haoa the latest technological tools and plenty of funding, they've advanced her survey to the point where she now expects to finish within five years. In return, Haoa has altered their worldview. Where most see tragedy and sadness in Rapa Nui's history, they now see innovation and the human capacity for survival. Where others see doom, they now see hope.

On a final trek before I head home, Haoa takes me to a stretch of earth that few people on this planet have witnessed. Haoa has logged 35,000 archeological sites on the island, but the landscape remains covered in rock gardens that have not been surveyed. I suggest that a five-year time frame seems optimistic. She admits that it's an ambitious schedule, but she's committed. "That's next year," she says, pointing to a hillside in the distance.

As we trudge up a slope in driving rain, she stops in her tracks and picks up what appears to be a sand dollar. "This is a baby's skull," she says, explaining that the density demonstrates that it was human and the open sutures show that it belonged to an infant. She steps off the path toward a small gathering of rocks, tucks the bone into the pile, and covers it. There it will lie, alongside so much of the rest of Easter Island's mysterious past, for who knows how long. Without another word she renews her dogged trek, walking stick in hand, into the future.  

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