Sahara, an arid abode of sand dunes and fossils, was a much wetter environment 5,000 years ago. Desert cliff drawings from that time depict giraffes, elephants, and hippos. Much of the water that fed that ecosystem seeped through layers of sandstone to form “fossil water”—nonrenewable aquifers dating from at least 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Paleowater, or fossil water, is as valuable as fossil fuel and the only option in desert nations, who are its obvious only users. This ancient freshwater was created eons ago and trapped underground in huge reservoirs, or aquifers. Agricultural projects harnessing fossil water have been successful in several places.
Many people are using it, and using it up, without knowing. And like oil, no one knows how much there is—but as we know of all our natural resources, when it’s gone, it’s gone.
The North Western Sahara Aquifer System. North Western Sahara Aquifer System (widely known under the French acronym SASS) is shared by Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. SASS covers a total area of more than 1 million sq Km, and contains considerable water reserves estimated at 30,000 billion m3. The trans-boundary nature of this major aquifer exposes it to various risks such as over-exploitation, and water quality degradation.
The North Western Sahara Aquifer System (NWSAS), shared by Algeria, Libya and Tunisia, contains considerable water reserves which are, however, mostly non-renewable and not fully exploitable. The NWSAS covers an area of over 1 million Km2 and includes two main deep aquifer layers: the Intercalary Continental and the Terminal Complex. During the last thirty years, withdrawals from NWSAS grew apace from 0.6 to 2.5 billion m3/an. Due to the non-concerted withdrawal multiplication, the resource is currently confronting many risks such as water salinity, declining artesianism, natural discharge depletion, piezometric level drawdown, or interferences between the countries.
The Great Man-Made River Pipelines to Benghazi
The Great Man-Made River of Libya. The world’s biggest effort to reclaim deposits of fossil water is the Great Man-Made River in Libya, for which Gaddafi has spent $30 billion over the past three decades building for his people and given as a gift to the Third World without any financial or help from the USA, World Bank or IMF.
Libya‘s 95% desert land is habitable because of this 1,200 miles of high quality vast reservoirs of fossil water, with 1,500 wells pumping as much as 1.7 billion gallons (6.5 million cubic meters) of fresh water each day from the Sahara to cities on the Mediterranean coast— some of them 75,000 years old — which were discovered in the form of aquifers during the 1950s oil explorationsdeep in the southern Libyan desert.
The Gaddafi Vision. Muammar Gaddafi and his Great Man-Made River Project was launched in the 1980s – an epic system of pipes, reservoirs, and engineering infrastructure is still being built. When finished, it will pump from circa 1,300 paleowater wells and move 230 million cubic feet (6.5 million cubic meters) of H2O every day. Construction of the first phase started in 1984,
False-color image of the Grand Omar Mukhtar reservoir project. Water (dark blue) residing in reservoirs appears twice in this image, in the upper right and at the bottom. Vegetation appears red, cityscape structures such as pavement and buildings appear in gray, bare ground appears tan or beige. and cost about $5 billion. Gaddafi spent $30 billion (USD) – all of which solely paid for by the Libyan sovereign wealth fund.
Gaddafi and the Libyan Arab people’s aim and vision for this project: To make Libya a source of agricultural abundance, capable of producing adequate food and water to supply its own needs and to share with neighboring countries. In short, self-sufficiency for Libya.
The Great Man-Made River (GMR) is a network of pipes that supplies water to the Sahara Desert in Libya, from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer. It is the world's largest irrigation project. It is the largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere.
The Great Man-Made River, is the largest water transport project ever undertaken in the world, and has been described as the “eighth wonder of the world”. There are four major underground basins: The Kufra basin, the Sirt basin, the Morzuk basin and the Hamada basin. The first three contains combined reserves of 35,000 cubic kilometers of water. It carries more than five million cubic meters of water per day across the desert to coastal areas, vastly increasing the amount of arable land. The estimate amount of water in the Nile River? 200 years. Thus, the vast reserves offer almost unlimited amounts of water for the Libyan people, which also can be shared to the Middle East and Africa.
The Western Business Multi-Agendas. Virtually unknown to the world, this incredibly huge and impressive Gaddafi and Libya water project rivals and surpasses all the greatest development projects by so-called “advanced” countries, particularly the West.
London and Washington circles were extremely indignant about the Libyan water project. The London Financial Times ran criticisms of the project from Angus Henley of the London-based Middle East Economic Digest, “Qaddafi’s pet project. He wants to be seen as something other than the scourge of the West.” The Financial Times called the project Qaddafi’s “pipedream,” stating that critics may be awed by the engineering involved, “But they regard the dream as a monument to vanity that makes little economic sense in a country where the U.N. Development Program says 94.6% of territory is desert wasteland.”
That is the official global mass media cosmetic mask version of the naysayers.
The real truth for the apoplectic attack? The West simply refuses to recognize that a small country, with a population no more than six million, can construct anything such awe-inspiring and mind-blowing large project without borrowing a single cent from the international banks. The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has liquid cash and owes no debt to any nation nor institution. All due to Gaddafi’s leadership and stewardship of Libyan oil earned assets.
The Great Man-Made River project and its objectives fly in the face of the water-control schemes sanctioned by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). World Bank, IMF and the U.S. State Department only backs and promotes their politically favored projects like that “Middle East Water Summit” in Turkey, desalination plants in Saudi Arabia and water shortages elsewhere.
A prime example of “great projects” that these institutions have blocked work on is the Jonglei Canal–the huge ditch that was designed as a straight channel on the upper White Nile in southern Sudan. The Jonglei Canal, which stands half-finished and abandoned at present, would have drained swamplands, aided agriculture, transportation, power resources, and health, and provided expanded flow to the Nile River all the way down to Egypt.
Over the last 20 years, the water improvement projects envisioned for Egypt, which could provide more water and more hectares of agricultural and residential land, have been repeatedly sabotaged by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and the Anglo-American financial interests behind them.
U.S. also invested $600 million to Jordan in order to tap Jordan’s last primary water reserve, the Disi aquifer, on the border with Saudi Arabia.?Jordan hopes that the country’s large fossil-water resources can help stem its chronic water shortage.?The project envisions a system that can move 3.5 billion cubic feet (99 million cubic meters) of water each year over a mostly uphill, 200-mile-long (320 kilometer-long) stretch from the remote southern desert to the capital city of Amman.
Gaddafi and Libya build their Dream. Libyans are a proud people and no one, who is not a Libyan, tells them what to do. Thus, Gaddafi and the Libyan Arab people went ahead with their dream of self-sufficiency with no care for anyone’s approval, and especially, not the West.
Under the guidance of their “Father” Gaddafi, the people of Libya Arab Jamahiriya, initiated a series of scientific studies on the possibility of accessing this vast ocean of fresh water, i.e. fossil water. Considerations on new agricultural projects close to the sources of the water, in the desert were also simultaneously being developed. However, they realized that the project a very large infrastructure organization and necessitates a major redistribution of the population from the coastal belt. The alternative was to ‘bring the water to the people’.
In October 1983, the Great Man-made River Authority was created and invested with the responsibility of taking water from the aquifers in the south, and conveying it by the most economical and practical means for use, predominantly for irrigation, in the Libyan coastal belt.
South Korean construction experts built the huge pipes in Libya by some of the most modern techniques. The engineering feat involves collecting water from 270 wells in east central Libya, and transporting it through about 2,000 kilometers of pipeline to Benghazi and Sirte. The new “river” brings 2 million cubic meters of water a day. At completion, the system will involve 4,000 kilometers of pipepines, and two aqueducts of some 1,000 kilometers.
By 1996 the Great Man-Made River Project had reached one of its final stages, the gushing forth of sweet unpolluted water to the homes and gardens of the citizens of Libya’s capital Tripoli. A gala inauguration ceremony, marked the end of Phase I of the project, was held in Libya at the end of August, at which Libyan leaders “turned on the tap” of the Great Man-Made River, the water pipeline/viaduct project designed to bring millions of liters of water from beneath the Sahara Desert, northward to the Benghazi region on the Mediterranean coast.
The Great Man-Made River (GMR) is a network of pipes that supplies water to the Sahara Desert in Libya, from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer. It is the world's largest irrigation project. It is the largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere.
Dozens of Arab and African heads of state and hundreds of other foreign diplomats and delegations joined in celebrating the inauguration of the artificial river, like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, King Hassan of Morocco, the head of Sudan, Gen. Omar El Beshir, and Djibouti’s President Hassan Julied. Louis Farrakhan, who took part in the opening ceremony, described the Great Man-Made River as “another miracle in the desert.”
Gaddafi presented the project to the cheering crowd as a “gift to the Third World”. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, addressing an audience that included Libyans and many foreign guests, Col. Gaddafi said, the project “was the biggest answer to America… who accuse us of being concerned with terrorism. After this achievement, American threats against Libya will double…. The United States will make excuses, [but] the real reason is to stop this achievement, to keep the people of Libya oppressed.”
The Miracle’s viable projectiles. Over 95% of Libya is desert, and the new water sources can open up thousands of hectares of irrigated farmland. At present over 80% of the country’s agriculture production comes from the coastal regions, where local aquifers have been overpumped, and salt water intrusion is taking place. The Great Man-Made River will relieve this. The water now flowing will immediately supplement supplies for domestic and industrial needs in Benghazi and Sirte. In this giant scheme, water is pumped from aquifers under the Sahara in the southern part of the country, where underground water resources extend into Egypt and Sudan. Then the water is transported by reinforced concrete pipeline to northern destinations.
Consisting of a network of pipes buried underground to eliminate evaporation, four meters in diameter, the project extends for four thousand kilometres far deep into the desert. All material is locally engineered and manufactured. Underground water is pumped from 270 wells hundreds of meters deep into reservoirs that feed the network. The cost of one cubic meter of water equals 35 cents. The cubic meter of desalinized water is $3.75.
http://thesantosrepublic.com/multimedia/photogallery/2011/07/libya4.jpg
Libyan officials plan for 80% of the overall project’s flow to eventually be used for irrigating old farms, and reclaiming some desert lands. Since 20% of Libya’s imports are foodstuffs, expanded water supplies are a means to greater self-sufficiency.
Gaddafi and the Neighborly issues. Mubarak spoke at the 1996 Great Man-Made River Inaugural ceremony and stressed the regional importance of the project. Gaddafi called on Egyptian farmers to come and work in Libya, where there are only 4 million inhabitants at the time. Egypt’s population of 55 million is crowded in narrow bands along the Nile River and delta region.
In the 1970s, Qaddafi expelled many Egyptian families from Libya, but over the recent years the two countries have become close once again. There were plans to build a railway line to facilitate the two nations travel back and forth. There was also a standing commission plans between Sudan and Libya for integrating economic activity.
But even with that 1,800 miles of giant hydrological enterprise in operation, Libya still depends on foreign markets for three-quarters of its grain. To make his desert nation self-sufficient in food, Gaddafi made some long-term deals with nearby countries to grow food for Libya.
The Western African state of Mali has become dependent on Libya for aid and investment, funding its government buildings, hotels, and other high-profile infrastructure. Thus, a secret deal was struck between Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Toure, and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi became the solution to enhance Libyan food security by receiving 50 years worth of undisclosed rights, paid by the Libya Africa Portfolio Fund for Investment. Libyan-controlled organization called Malibya oversees the Libyan enterprise: A canal stretching 25 miles north from the River Niger to 250,000 acres of proposed irrigated land at the edge of the marshes, to divert large amounts of Niger River water for extensive irrigation upstream. It was dug in 2010 by Chinese contractors, who are now preparing the first 15,000 acres of fields.
The scale of the project is astounding. The director general of Malibya, Abdalilah Youssef, boasted in 2008 that the canal could supply up to 4 cubic kilometers of water a year to the enterprise’s fields of rice, tomatoes, and fodder crops for cattle. The current take for all other existing irrigation projects is 2.7 cubic kilometers a year, it grabs as much as 210 cubic meters a second, potentially more than doubling the amount of water taken from the river for irrigation.
Larger than Belgium, it is Africa’s second-largest floodplain and one of its most unique wetlands. Seen from space, it is an immense smudge of green and blue on the edge of the Sahara.
