Call to tap hidden water under desert

Gulf News ^ | July 01, 2007 | Emmanuelle Landais

[SunkenCiv]

Groundwater reserves under Arabian deserts have yet to be exploited but could provide vital resources for agriculture in some of the world's driest areas, according to a space photography expert. Large underground reserves are situated under what appears to be barren deserts, said Farouk Al Baz... Director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University... Al Baz said radar images of Arab deserts have revealed numerous courses of rivers and streams that led to depressions where lakes have formed... "A lot of pumping in one area at the same level is not good. What is there is probably all there is. The underwater reserves won't be renewed by rainfall, they might be filled from the sides but you shouldn't count on it," said Al Baz... Apparently fresh water has been found to seep out off the coast of Oman in the ocean. "Pearl divers who knew their environment very well knew this and would dive with jugs to collect freshwater to have enough to drink during long months at sea," he said.

[SunkenCiv]

Farouk Al Baz, a veteran of the Apollo Programme, and Research Professor and Director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University.

[SunkenCiv]

Farouk Al Baz originated the idea that the Great Sphinx at Giza began as a yardang.

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[NonValueAdded]

Stilgar, they’re on to us; take all precautions. Maud’ Dib sends.

[blam]

" Apparently fresh water has been found to seep out off the coast of Oman in the ocean. "Pearl divers who knew their environment very well knew this and would dive with jugs to collect freshwater to have enough to drink during long months at sea," he said."

I read about this before from other sources. Apparently it's true.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Well, the Comic Sans font is appropriate for this article.

[GovernmentIsTheProblem]

For your readers -

A yardang is a rock ridge feature caused by wind and water erosion. The word itself is of Turkish origin, meaning ‘steep bank’. Some are found in dried-up riverbeds. Yardangs may also be found in deserts and may form very unusual shapes and some resemble various objects or even people.

Yardangs are elongate features typically three or more times longer than they are wide, and when viewed from above, resemble the hull of a boat. Facing the wind is a steep, blunt face that gradually gets lower and narrower toward the lee end1. They come in a large range of sizes, and are divided into three different categories: mega-yardangs, meso-yardangs, and micro-yardangs. Mega-yardangs can be several kilometers long and hundreds of meters high, meso-yardangs are generally a few meters high and 10 to 15 meters long, and micro-yardangs are only a few centimeters high.

[ClearCase_guy]

I suggest that we send some drilling rigs to the Middle East. If we sink a few wells, we might hit something good.

[stainlessbanner]

There are several fresh water boils in the Gulf of Mexico. The FL caverns transport fresh water miles offshore, under the ocean floor and release the freshwater into the ocean.

[RightWhale]

I have always thought the Sphinx was a yarddang. Probably everybody who thought about it at all thought so. Who is this Farouk al Baz? BTW, the Sphinx originally had a lion head and you can see where they chopped it away to make the ludicrously undersized human head, which was after the Great Pyramid had already reduced the normal rainfall to almost zero.

[ClearCase_guy]

micro-yardangs are only a few centimeters high.

They have pills that can turn a micro to a meso.

[blam]

"There are several fresh water boils in the Gulf of Mexico."

Thanks. I suppose there would be. I got artesian water at a depth of 202 feet here on Mobile Bay.

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.saudicaves.com/cavedive/index.html

As you drive south from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, towards Al Kharj, you will see the desert dotted with circular areas of lush green grass. They provide fodder for some of the biggest dairy farms in the world. Their cultivation here, in the middle of the desert, is made possible by fossil water. It lies in natural reservoirs deep under the ground. They were created during a climatic period of more rain when there were green forests here. On some places near Al Kharj this water comes close to the surface and big sink holes, or "Dahls" in Arabic, have opened in the ground.

[Fred Nerks]

remote sensing? looks as if he missed this:

The Al-Safi dairy in Saudi Arabia is the largest commercial dairy in the world.

[SunkenCiv]

I have always thought the Sphinx was a yarddang. Probably everybody who thought about it at all thought so.

I've thought about it, and it doesn't make sense, because the Sphinx was literally mined out of what is now the enclosure around the Sphinx. As Robert Schoch has said, it's possible that the head of the Sphinx began as a yardang (though now it's impossible to tell), but the body of the Sphinx could not have been.

[SunkenCiv]

“El-Baz has long promulgated his notion that the Great Sphinx of Giza is nothing more than a yardang (an aerodynamically stable natural erosional landform-essentially a wind-shaped hill) that was merely ‘dressed up’ by the Old Kingdom Egyptians to look like a sphinx (F. El-Baz, ‘Desert builders knew a good thing when they saw it,’ Smithsonian [April 1981],116-121; F. El-Baz, ‘Egypt’s desert of promise,’ National Geographic [February 1982], 190-221). Thus, El-Baz believes that the Old Kingdom architects and sculptors incorporated very ancient (pre-Old Kingdom) erosional features found on a natural hill into their sculpting of the Sphinx.”

http://www.robertschoch.net/Redating%20the%20Great%20Sphinx%20of%20Giza.htm

a bit more:

http://www.antiquityofman.com/Schoch_Omni.html

related (even less interest than my bison topic):

The Yardangs of Mars
Geological Society (UK) | July 24, 2004 | staff
Posted on 01/01/2005 2:18:55 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1312117/posts

[RightWhale]

Of course the head (the original lion head) and neck were the yarddang. The body was quarried out, not mined and the blocks were used to construct the temple complex next to the Sphinx.

[SunkenCiv]

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