Mechanical pumps turning Oasis into mirages #Egypt

Using a hoe, farmer Atef Sayyid removes
an earthen plug in an irrigation stream, allowing water to
spill onto the parcel of land where he grows dates, olives
and almonds.
Until recently, a natural spring exploited since Roman times
supplied the iron-rich water that he uses for irrigation. But
when the spring began to dry up in the 1990s, the
government built a deep well to supplement its waning flow.
Today, a noisy diesel pump syphons water from over a
kilometre below the ground. The steaming-hot water is
diverted through a maze of earthen canals to irrigate the
orchards and palm groves that lie below the dusty town of
Bawiti, 300 kilometres southwest of Cairo.
"The deeper source means the water is hotter," Sayyid
explains. "The hot water damages the roots of the fruit
trees. It also evaporates quicker, meaning we have to use
more water to irrigate."
Bahariya, the depression in which Bawiti is situated, is one
of five major oases in Egypt's Western Desert. While
Egyptians living in the densely populated Nile River Valley
and Delta depend on the Nile for their freshwater needs,
communities in this remote and arid region rely entirely on
underground sources.
Since ancient times, freshwater has percolated through
fissures in the bedrock, making agriculture possible in the
otherwise inhospitable desert. Water was once so plentiful
in the five oases that they were collectively known as a
breadbasket of the Roman Empire on account of their
intensive grain cultivation.
Ominously, where groundwater once flowed naturally or
was tapped near the surface, farmers must now bore up to a
kilometre underground, raising fears for the region's
sustainability.
"Historically, springs and artesian wells supplied all the
water in the oases," says Richard Tutwiler, a resource
management specialist at the American University in Cairo.
"But water pressure is dropping and increasingly it has to
be pumped out, particularly as you go from south to north."
The water is drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, an
underground reservoir of fossil water accumulated over
tens of thousands of years when the Saharan region was
less arid than it is today. The vast aquifer extends beneath
much of Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad, and is estimated to
hold 150,000 cubic kilometres of groundwater.