LIBYAN DESERT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 September 1940, Page 9

LIBYAN DESERT

ARTESIAN WATER SUPPLY. NEV/ LIGHT ON ORIGIN. The Egyptian Government has allotted in its Budget for 1940 a credit of £lO,OOO (Egyptian) for sinking further experimental artesian wells in the Libyan Desert. The possibilities of water from the waterless wastes are of more than academic interest, and recent research suggests that the results of the borings may be of great value to the future Egypt, writes the Cairo correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor.”

The oases which occur in the depressions of the Sahara have probably been knowm from earliest times, but it w'as certainly due to Roman energy and ingenuity that a system of wells was planned, especially in the Oases of Kharga, Dakhla, and of Siwa, where the famous oracle of Jupiter Ammon was situated. The source of this subsoil water was unknown, though the impression that it was the Nile was generally accepted until quite recent times.

Dr. John Ball, of the Egyptian Desert Survey, after taking levels and studying the geology of the region, has come to the conclusion that the water comes from Central Africa, perhaps even from as far south as the Congo Basin where it saturates the stratum of Nubian sandstone w'hich underlies or overlies the greater part, if not all of North-eastern Africa.

This assumption is further strength/ened by the borings that have recently been made in the Oases of Kharga and Dakhla, which lie approximately 125 and 250 miles respectively W'est of Luxor in Upper Egypt. Thus, at Dakhla plentiful water was found at a depth of 700 feet, rising under natural pressure to the ground surface level of more than 300 feet above sea level, whereas at Kharga. 125 miles to the east, water was found at a depth of more than 1,500 feet and rose to a level of about 240 feet above sea level, while the level of the Nile another 125 miles further east is about 220 feet above sea level.

The water gradient would therefore appear to be from the desert towards the Nile Valley, not from the Nile towards the west.

All four wells bored gave good supplies, especially that at Dakhla, where a six-inch tube gave the remarkable discharge of 1,200 gallons per minute, or sufficient to irrigate liberally more than 200 acres.

In the past new shallow wells when sunk at once affected adversely the discharge of old wells in the neighbourhood. So far, the new wells have had no similar’ effect, and there is therefore justification for believing that the supply now tapped is practically' inexhaustible. In this connection it is interesting to note that the Italian authorities have in recent years been successfully sinking a large number of similarly deep wells in Tripoli. In all probability the source of this water is precisely the same as that of the Egyptian Sahara.

If this is so, the optimism recently expressed by a high Egyptian official that the Western Desert, especially near the Mediterranean, where the soil is generally of excellent quality, will prove ultimately a home for the surplus of Egypt's ever-growing population, is justifiable.