Egypt: Mechanical Pumps Turning Oases Into Mirages

Oases Turned Into Mirages

Using a hoe, farmer Atef Sayyid removes an earthen plug in an irrigation stream, allowing water to spill onto the parcel of land where he grows dates, olives and almonds.

Until recently, a natural spring exploited since Roman times supplied the iron-rich water that he uses for irrigation. But when the spring began to dry up in the 1990s, the government built a deep well to supplement its waning flow.

Today, a noisy diesel pump syphons water from over a kilometre below the ground. The steaming-hot water is diverted through a maze of earthen canals to irrigate the orchards and palm groves that lie below the dusty town of Bawiti, 300 kilometres southwest of Cairo.

"The deeper source means the water is hotter," Sayyid explains. "The hot water damages the roots of the fruit trees. It also evaporates quicker, meaning we have to use more water to irrigate."

Bahariya, the depression in which Bawiti is situated, is one of five major oases in Egypt's Western Desert. While Egyptians living in the densely populated Nile River Valley and Delta depend on the Nile for their freshwater needs, communities in this remote and arid region rely entirely on underground sources.

Since ancient times, freshwater has percolated through fissures in the bedrock, making agriculture possible in the otherwise inhospitable desert. Water was once so plentiful in the five oases that they were collectively known as a breadbasket of the Roman Empire on account of their intensive grain cultivation.

Ominously, where groundwater once flowed naturally or was tapped near the surface, farmers must now bore up to a kilometre underground, raising fears for the region's sustainability.

"Historically, springs and artesian wells supplied all the water in the oases," says Richard Tutwiler, a resource management specialist at the American University in Cairo. "But water pressure is dropping and increasingly it has to be pumped out, particularly as you go from south to north."

The water is drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, an underground reservoir of fossil water accumulated over tens of thousands of years when the Saharan region was less arid than it is today. The vast aquifer extends beneath much of Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad, and is estimated to hold 150,000 cubic kilometres of groundwater.

Source: All Africa

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Taxonomy

• Environment
• Desert Biomes