r/Maps • u/hrscbllkkcccbhg • Aug 28 '21
Was there a huge lake between Libya and egypt? Question
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u/RufioGP Aug 28 '21
I think it was a German scientist who suggested it but the British and French were serious about trying it, they wanted to build trenches from the Mediterranean to flood this depression. The idea was to terraform the desert into a more habitable place and for agriculture. Never ended up trying it obviously but was a radical idea none the less.
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u/eip2yoxu Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 29 '21
They're still running feasibility studies on it. Iirc the issue is it could turn several natural oasis near the depression into saltwater lakes, which would obviously be disastrous. But it also has the potential to change the climate in the area to produce more rain, the salt from the water of the mediterranian sea could be harvested and they could install hydro energy plants.
So it's not off the table yet. Super interesting project imo
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u/ArsenicAndJoy Aug 28 '21
Would also help a bit with sea level rise
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u/respondstolongpauses Aug 28 '21
I was wondering about that. an expert could easily calculate how much water this would displace. obviously of too much now it'd create all sort of issues for ports in mediterranean and possibly elsewhere. pretty cool idea though.
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u/fireballetar Aug 28 '21
Your definition of easily scares me
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u/jvriesem Aug 29 '21 edited Aug 29 '21
Somewhere, there’s a Digital Elevation Model (DEM in the biz, but a map of elevations to the rest of us). An expert would be able to find one of those without any trouble. Many are freely available.
Now: Think of each pixel on that map like the bottom block of a column of blocks in Minecraft. The DEM tells you how deep the column is for every pixel on the map — how many blocks deep that land is below sea level, for instance. If you want to estimate the volume of that region, all you need to do is tell the computer to add up the number of blocks in each column in that region. The total number of blocks times the volume of each block gives a very accurate estimate of the region’s volume. (Of course, a higher resolution map means smaller block sizes which would give a better estimate of the total volume.) If you want to calculate it out to a certain volume, one can just count that many fewer blocks per column. It’s not too hard, when you know what you’re doing! :-)
Tools exist for those summations (“2D quadrature”, which is a 2D approximation of a 2D integral). Numerical experts can use interpolating techniques to improve the estimate without changing the block size (e.g. via 2D interpolating splines).
The biggest difficulty there would be in defining the region, but I bet there are selection tools for that, just like in photo editing software.
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u/JConRed Aug 29 '21
I'm in bed right now, but I'll have a look at the numbers tomorrow - when I'm actually awake.
Edit: Clarification, that is mostly a reminder for myself.
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Aug 28 '21
What if they were to divert the Nile 🤔.
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u/LiamEd2000 Aug 28 '21
That would probably take much longer to fill it up. Not to mention Egypt probably won’t want to give up that water at all
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u/HaydenJA3 Aug 29 '21
Ethiopia is already trying to take Egypt’s water by damming the Nile upstream
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u/Duke_of_Deimos Aug 29 '21
damn ethiopians
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u/andyjh83 Aug 29 '21
Everyone just walking past your quality pun-work. Shame on them. Bravo good sir.
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Aug 28 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/releasethedogs Aug 28 '21
It’s a hell scape. The shore is made of what looks like large gravel on closer inspection it’s fish bones; the whole area smells like death. It’s an ecological disaster.
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u/GingerTrash_ Aug 29 '21
That is slightly different, as that came from diverted river water, while this would come from the ocean. And thanks to climate change, we won't need to worry about it drying out.
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u/mathr_kiel Aug 29 '21
I think we will, in some (many) areas - droughts will be more common. At least clean drinking water will be an issue.
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u/cass1o Aug 28 '21
Egypt would die.
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Aug 28 '21
Yes, but consider, big lake
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u/Benjamin-Doverman Aug 28 '21
Seems like a far trade
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u/chaos_jj_3 Aug 28 '21
I get: big lakey boi
You get: the effective end of your 5000 year old civilisation
Mmhmm. Okay. I'm listening.
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u/A_ahc Aug 28 '21
Nile water can not fill it. I think you never heard of Atlantropa project. Basically project planned to build dams in Gibraltar and Dardanelles then remove 100 meter of water from Mediterranean and place it on the depression areas on Sahara. So you'd get new lands to settle and farm in Mediterranean and Sahara.
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Aug 28 '21
Don't worry I'm mostly pissing around, you can see at a glance that the Nile lacks the volume and it would probably result in the Mediterranean flowing into the Nile as a result
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u/J-A-G-S Aug 28 '21
They'd have to ask Ethiopia to let the water back into the Nile first... It's already running half capacity
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u/Duke_of_Deimos Aug 29 '21
I guess it would take a lot of time to fill the area and a lot of angry egytians lol.
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u/grayum_ian Aug 29 '21
Wouldn't this either kill or damage the Amazon?
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u/Warm-Book-820 Aug 29 '21
Possibly. Sand blowing from Africa is an important fetilizer (phosphorus) for the amazon. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150224102847.htm
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u/Kytann Aug 29 '21
What about 10000+ years ago when the Sahara was covered in forests. Was the Amazon also covered in forests?
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u/Warm-Book-820 Sep 14 '21
Dunno. I think it was transitioning from being a huge lake/swamp as the amazon river established its current west to east course. Maybe it was less fertile without minerals from the shara, or maybe different plants dominated. Global climate and ice age likely had a larger influence. https://www.google.com/amp/s/rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/
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u/Iusedthistocomment Aug 29 '21
So it's not off the table yet. Super interesting project imo
In my house, salt always stays on the table.
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u/hondo9999 Aug 29 '21
It’d be hella cool if they were able to use all that sand as a type of filtration system to remove the salt and fill up any underground aquifers too.
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Aug 29 '21
The people running feasibility studies are ignoring previous studies that show the awful effects it would have for literally everyone in both continents. It's an awful idea that would end up drying Southern Europe out massively and cause loads of area which is meant to be dessert into forests.
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u/hrscbllkkcccbhg Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21
I live in egypt, there is a lot of development on the Mediterranean coast and a new alamein city, with lots of streets and bridges being built. So this project would make a lot of sense, here is apaper I found about the project to bring water to this depression.
“Berlin geographer Penk first suggested the use of the Qattara Depression as a hydroelectric project in 1912. He was followed by Ball in 1927 who studied its use for hydroelectric purposes with lakes at different levels below mean sea level, and hence different surface areas and evaporation rates. He considered the effects of possible climatic changes, evaporation, seepage, electrical transmission loss, cost per MW of installed capacity, geology, and topography. He recommended a lake at a 50 m depth below msl, and a route starting west of El Alamein in a south-west direction.”
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u/lifeisgr00d Aug 28 '21
Here's a video on the ongoing project to plant 10-mi wide tree buffer along the entire southern border of the Sahara to slow down the desertification: https://youtu.be/Zjy_JH1aaqU
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u/MontanaAg11 Aug 28 '21
I’ve lived in the west for a long time, I’ve always thought it would interesting doing the same with a pipeline to Death Valley. The thought would be the water that was pumped in would add more moisture to the air east of it.
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u/I-eat-ducks Aug 28 '21
wasn’t there also a guy tryna nuke the area between the mediterranean and the lake area to let in water easier
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u/BelAirGhetto Aug 29 '21
Similar to the salton sea in Southern California?
Wound up in resin salinity ove the years, I think
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Aug 29 '21
I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of germans, french, and brits digging trenches... again.
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u/johnwestnl Aug 28 '21
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Aug 28 '21
https://sci-hub.se paste the doi visible in the above article to this link, it allows you to view it for free, not illegal
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u/GeographerJim Aug 28 '21
Why do you even need to do this? All PNAS content is freely available 6 months after publication and this paper is from 2011 https://www.pnas.org/page/about/faq#access
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u/az_infinity Aug 28 '21
"not illegal" sadly, it is illegal
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Aug 28 '21
It's a gray area afaia
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u/az_infinity Aug 28 '21
Check out Elsevier et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. Also, Alexandra Elbakyan, sci-hub's founder, is at risk of being extradited towards the US. This is almost Snowden-level illegal, not "gray area".
As far as you're concerned, you're not risking anything by downloading from Sci-Hub. But the website itself is illegal for copyright infringement.
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u/conCraft113 Aug 28 '21
I heard somewhere, that there once was a lake called megachad, but idk if it was just a joke
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u/Moosanthropy Aug 28 '21
If I remember correctly the word chad actually means lake. I don't know in what language though.
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u/NotJustAnotherHuman Aug 28 '21
so that would mean that “Lake Megachad” would translate to “Lake Megalake”
i like it
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Aug 28 '21
[deleted]
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u/CvLobau Aug 28 '21
I was about to make this very comment, but you beat me to it. Guess you're the bigger Lake here.
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u/Strattifloyd Aug 28 '21
It's like the Sahara Desert. "Sahara" means desert. So you're just saying the "Desert Desert".
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u/tripsafe Aug 28 '21
That's until you find out that mega actually means lake as well. I don't know in what language either. Lake lakelake.
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u/fforster1 Aug 28 '21
I don't know how the language is called but it's the language they speak in chad, which means lake, so yeah that's true
Also so basically the country chad is translated the country lake which is kinda ironic if you look where chad is
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u/hrscbllkkcccbhg Aug 28 '21
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u/FatFingerHelperBot Aug 28 '21
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u/SomeDingus_666 Aug 28 '21
I remember seeing something about lake megachad on another post. It was a hypothetical lake that would have been formed by the damming of the Nile in that region, which as explained by the post, was a hypothetical possibility had WWI not happened. But more to your point, if my memory serves me correctly from my paleogeography studies, I’m pretty sure there was a large lake in this region a couple of million years ago. But again, I don’t have a source handy and I could be wrong here.
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u/TheCynicEpicurean Aug 28 '21
The Qattara Depression, reaching -115 m bsl. Don't know when it was a lake last though, but it might still have contained water bodies ~8,000 years ago, given the vegetation history of the Sahara.
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u/joofish Aug 28 '21
There have been proposals to reflood the Qattara depression to help the regions water issues.
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u/133DK Aug 28 '21
What’re the pros and cons..?
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u/joofish Aug 28 '21
The water and hydroelectricity would sustain Egypt's population boom without depleting the resources of the Nile. Cons would be that a some amount of people would have to be resettled and that it would be insanely expensive and impractically massive.
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u/Wouterr0 Aug 28 '21
Pros: -water might allow agriculture and vegetation Cons: -you will need to blast a canal from the Mediterranean with Nuclear bombs, making the region radioactive -will be incredibly expensive -water will probably evaporate anyway
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u/Notbapticostalish Aug 28 '21
I can’t imagine nukes are the only option
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u/joofish Aug 28 '21
Nukes were surprisingly enough the cheaper option when they were considered in the 50s, but that was the atomic 50s and there's no way they would do that today.
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Aug 28 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/carpiediem Aug 29 '21
They idea is that the new sea would trigger more reason in the area. But yes, dinner existing aquifers in the area would salinify.
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u/Tomyboiuno Aug 28 '21
I heard about a sea under sahara so why not?
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u/_ProfessorHamish_ Aug 28 '21
Almost guarenteed, the entire Sahara Desert used to be a lush forrest with rivers, streams, lakes, etc up until about 20k years ago ish
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u/caseywishna Aug 28 '21
There’s a whole episode about this area on Netflix. There used to be a lake there called “mega-chad” and now there are thousands of fossils in that area. There are also two mountainous regions to the north east and the north west, that form a passage of wind coming from the northeast that blows dust/ sand off of the fossils, exposing them. Then that wind blows across the Atlantic where it gets picked up by the Gulf Stream and then deposited all over the Amazon rainforest, fertilizing the soil. The series is called “connected” and it is the dust episode. :)
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u/smarzn121 Aug 28 '21
What show on Netflix
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u/Mondonodo Aug 28 '21
It's "Connected", hosted by Latif Nasser.
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u/smarzn121 Aug 28 '21
Thanks I def need to split my Netflix profile from my wife cause this very up my alley show only had. 57% match!
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u/Fa1se-Personality Aug 28 '21
There's a place called the valley of whales In the western desert in Egypt. It have a lot of whales skeletons just buried and above the sands of the desert. And it is said that it was an ocean once. But a lake? Idk
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Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21
Lake Chad was bigger in prehistoric times, it’s called Mega Chad. However, it didn’t reach all the way up to Egypt. The southren part of Egyptian westren desert was full of savanna trees separating it from a great prehistoric body of salt water which is now the northern western desert. Whale fossils are found all over the place.
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u/WikiSummarizerBot Aug 28 '21
Wadi Al-Hitan (Arabic: وادي الحيتان, "Valley of the Whales") is a paleontological site in the Faiyum Governorate of Egypt, some 150 kilometres (93 mi) south-west of Cairo. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2005 for its hundreds of fossils of some of the earliest forms of whale, the archaeoceti (a now extinct sub-order of whales). The site reveals evidence for the explanation of one of the greatest mysteries of the evolution of whales: the emergence of the whale as an ocean-going mammal from a previous life as a land-based animal.
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u/supercamman Aug 28 '21
RealLifeLore did a video on it! They were actually going to nuke the Sahara desert to make a trench to the depression. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8t3X7tUTk5o
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Aug 29 '21
Yes. That's the same dried up lake that deposits the dust in the Amazon which is the reason the Amazon exist as it does today
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u/Thecoolercourier Aug 28 '21
Yes, the Sahara goes through dry and wet periods, in a wet period the Sahara becomes a large grassland with incredibly large lakes forming similar to that of the great lakes, so large that they're more like inland seas.
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u/DopyJrOG Aug 29 '21
Continental flooding about 18000 years ago. Still a theory but there is a youtuber that believes the eye of the Sahara is Atlantis. And was wiped out from it. Believed to be glacier melting or a volcano eruption that melted a glacier
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u/joemamma8393 Aug 29 '21
I know that that is! It's the giant drumstick of Africa!! Ancient giant chickens walked the Sahara millions of years ago and this is one of their fossils!! Amazing find
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u/SancoLv06 Aug 28 '21
wtf has that to do anything with being a lake?
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Aug 28 '21
Yeah, I don't understand the map either. I'm pretty sure I'm missing something here, if OP cared to explain, please. :D
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Aug 28 '21
Because it’s a massive depression over 150m below sea level, and ecological evidence in the area strongly suggests it was. It would behoove you to do a little reading on the subject
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u/BeirutrulesMrBarnes Aug 28 '21
I saw in a documentary that the Mediterranean extended into North Africa long long ago and then it receded and left some big terminal lakes which dried up afterwards.
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Aug 28 '21
Actually in the western part of egypt there is a place called the valley of the whales where many whales skeletons have been found sooooo
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u/ivss_xx Aug 28 '21
If I remember correctly, the popular science show "Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything" on Netflix talked and explored about Lake Megachad. Episode 3 called "Dust"
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u/bilkel Aug 29 '21
The accident of the Salton Sea in California a century ago, and what has become of it now, should shutdown any talk of this scheme.
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u/SatanicLemons Aug 29 '21
To the best of my understanding many 10s of thousands of years ago this region was opposite of what it is now. (Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong or go into further detail)
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u/hmiemad Aug 29 '21
As you can see on this map, the area you circled is elevated compared to the rest of the region, so no lake in that region in the recent past. The trails that you see are probably dunes or other features made by predominant winds over the centuries. If there used to be a lake, it was further into Chad or closer to the Mediterranean Sea in the Qattarah depression.
BTW, you can zoom out and navigate on the map. It's very satisfying and interesting.
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u/Vladikot Aug 29 '21
Idk about the lake but the Tethys sea with Basilosaurus killer whales definitely was there about 40 M years ago.
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u/Own-Math-9496 Aug 30 '21
And the handle to that whisk lats directly on My Country. I'm not an African, but that country was named after me.
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u/LongCoyote7 Aug 28 '21
Reminds me of the eye of Africa. The Sahara was definitely an interesting place 11500 years ago