This is extremely
suggestive in terms of future engineering possibilities. This lake can surely be reestablished by
simply building a major dam. The Nile
flood produces ample water that can be used judiciously to then slowly fill the
lake. Such a lake becomes important in
terms of local irrigation but even more so to support a local hydraulic cycle
pushing rains out to the east into the desert and supporting an expansion of
vegetation.
As posted here, the
Sahara is a prime prospect for recovering ground cover through not just the
application of the Eden machine but by major geo engineering. This one is a simple one with ancient geology
supports. Power production will help it
out of course and the size of the lake will capture most of the Nile silt which
will then allow the life of the Aswan Dam to be seriously extended.
Add in the possible
building of a Nile barrage and canal system to deliver water into the Qattara Depression
and we have a parallel Nile as well. All
told, it surely becomes possible to expand arable land in these deserts tenfold
by such build outs.
Enormous scale of Nile
megalake during last interglacial period revealed
Enormous
scale of Nile megalake during last interglacial period revealed Posted by
TANNAncient Environment, Breakingnews, Earth Science, Palaeontology, Sudan 2:00
PM The eastern Sahara Desert was once home to a 45,000 km2 freshwater lake
similar in surface area to the largest in the world today. A large dried lake
in the White Nile Valley floor [Credit: Barrows et al/ Geological Society of
America] A study led by the University of Exeter has revealed that the mega
lake was probably formed more than one hundred thousand years ago in the White
Nile River Valley in Sudan. Dr Tim Barrows of the University of Exeter and
colleagues used a dating approach based on exposure to cosmic rays to measure
the amount of the isotope beryllium-10 in shoreline deposits. Its abundance can
be used to calculate how long rocks or sediments have been exposed at the
surface of the earth. Using this method, the researchers dated the shoreline
sediments to about 109,000 years ago. Dr Barrows, of Geography, said: “The
eastern Sahara Desert is one of the most climatically sensitive areas on Earth,
varying from lake-studded savannah woodland to hyperarid desert on a timescale
of only thousands of years. “In currently semiarid Sudan there is widespread
evidence that a very large freshwater lake once filled the White Nile River
valley. Our study presents the first quantitative estimate for the dimensions
of the lake and a direct age for when it formed.” The researchers believe the
lake could have formed when the White Nile River – one of two main tributaries
of the Nile that flows through Egypt – became dammed during seasonal floods
under a more intense monsoon than the area currently experiences. It would have
been of comparable size by surface area to some of the largest freshwater lakes
on Earth today, such as Lake Baikal in Siberia, Lake Michigan in the US and
Lake Tanganyika in East Africa.
No comments:
Post a Comment