Free Republic

Throughout the arid regions of Iran, agricultural and permanent settlements are supported by the ancient qanat system of tapping alluvial aquifers at the heads of valleys and conducting the water along underground tunnels by gravity, often over many kilometres.Each qanat comprises an almost horizontal tunnel collecting water from an underground water source, usually an alluvial fan, into which a mother well is sunk to the appropriate level of the aquifer. Well shafts are sunk at regular intervals along the route of the tunnel to enable removal of spoil and allow ventilation. These appear as craters from above, following the line...

Already prone to droughts, Iran has exacerbated the problem with poor water management policies, which Mr. Pezeshkian acknowledged on Monday. Climate change, too, has played a role; the country has weathered five consecutive years of drought. Now, the crisis has grown so extreme that the government shut down all government offices and services in Tehran and more than two dozen other cities across the country on Wednesday, creating a three-day weekend in an attempt to lower water and electricity usage. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a government spokeswoman, said cities could have similar closures once or twice a week going forward, and suggested...

If Iran is in the news because of its nuclear program, the greatest threat to the country’s well-being isn’t economic sanctions or the Sunni-Shiite schism. Rather, the greatest threat to Iran may be that the country is running out of water. The problem is so severe that social unrest, economic dislocation, even out migration can all be imagined. One government advisor recently predicted that as many as fifty million Iranians—seventy percent of Iran’s population—may be forced to leave because of a lack of water. Water problems are a proxy for bad governance, and Iran has water problems galore. By contrast,...

A social media account affiliated with Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency published a pointed critique Friday of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accusing him of being unfit to govern due to alleged substance abuse and detachment from public needs. “How can a leader lead when they sleep half the day and spend the other half high on substances?” read the post in Farsi from the @MossadSpokesman account on X, formerly Twitter. It ended with a charged refrain: “Water, electricity, life!” The post, which was automatically translated from its original Farsi, did not name Khamenei directly but was widely interpreted as...

Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you.— Deuteronomy 11:17Mother Nature may accomplish something that neither the U.S. nor Israel could ever have contemplated: the evacuation of Tehran's 9.7 million inhabitants. Iran is currently experiencing its fifth consecutive year of drought, and the autumnal rainfall is about a quarter of that in 2024, that would be two millimeters. In short, Tehran...

Madani, who has long warned of environmental mismanagement in Iran, said the current water crisis across the nation was predictable. "The water bankruptcy situation was not created overnight," he said. "The house was already on fire, and people like myself had warned the government for years that this situation would emerge." President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that without rainfall before winter, Tehran could face partial evacuation, according to The Associated Press. Iran is facing its worst drought in decades, raising fears of evacuations in Tehran while threatening the regime’s stability and nuclear ambitions, according to a leading environmental expert. Kaveh Madani,...

Iran is set to turn off the water in several regions, including Tehran — as the country falls into the grips of its worst drought in decades. The Islamic Republic announced it would be shutting off its water supply on Saturday night due to the mounting crisis which will see the capital dry up — with officials contemplating evacuating it, Haaretz reported. “We are forced to cut off water supply to citizens on some evenings so that reservoirs can refill,” Energy Minister Abbas Alibadi said on state television Saturday.

In ancient times, the desert in the Udhruh region in Jordan was transformed into a green oasis. An intricate network of underground water channels was part of an ancient system of water management, storing water and preventing loss through evaporation.Archaeologist Mark Driessen has found a new way to investigate and map these channels: a remote controlled car.In 2022 the team started to excavate a 20 meter deep water channel (qanat) shaft, only one of more than 200 shafts that are part of this specific system. Mark Driessen descended into the shaft, entering the horizontal water channels below...The remote controlled car...

The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture. One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to...

Last September, when Iran’s uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country. In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of...

The Ancient World's Longest Underground Aqueduct Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. When the Romans weren't busy conquering their enemies, they loved to waste massive quantities of water, which gurgled and bubbled throughout their cities. The engineers of the empire invented standardized lead pipes, aqueducts as high as fortresses, and water mains with 15 bars (217 pounds per square inch) of pressure. PHOTO GALLERY: ROME'S LONGEST PIPE In...