Libya's remote, arid Kufra region sits atop one of the world's largest irrigation projects.
Far south of Libya, the Kufra district lies alone in the heart of the Sahara Desert.
Here, the sand dunes and rugged plateaus are endless, as if they were the unique touches of nature.
Much of the region is suffering from extreme drought, as if life has become a luxury at this moment. However, this seemingly eternal dry land has not always been like this.
Beneath the sand dunes lies a huge layer of fossilized aquifers and the remains of a dry riverbed, a reminder of the fertility of the land.
NASA's Terra satellite on board a medium-resolution imaging spectrometer captured stunning images of the Kufra region on May 26, 2022. This area is both the largest and most sparsely populated area in Libya.
In the upper left corner of the image, a vast sea of sand – the Ribiana (Rabyanah) sand sea meets the plateau on the northern edge of the Tibesti Mountains, revealing the wonders of nature. Most of the arid areas are lifeless, except for the vibrant green in the upper right corner of the image.
This green is the farmland in the city of Jawf, they are like an oasis in the desert, showing the tenacity and hope of life.
The layout of the farmland provides clues to how irrigation is done. The gridded field in the upper left corner may be furrowed irrigated, with water pumped between the rows of crops to create an evenly distributed channel.
A circular field, on the other hand, may be irrigated with a central pivot: water is drawn from a well in the center of the circle and distributed through pipes hundreds of yards long, rotating around the center like a whirlwind.
In this seemingly barren land, life blooms in a unique way, living in harmony with nature, composing a legendary story that belongs to this land.
The water used here for irrigation is pumped from a large underground aquifer known as the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. Located in most of the Kufra region, this huge reservoir contains fossil water that seeped into the sandstone of the region between 10,000 and 1,000,000 years ago, when the region received more rainfall and had a milder climate.
Evidence of this wet time is evident in the digital elevation data for Landsat and NASA's Space Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM). Scientists used the data to map large paleoriver systems that once traversed the area. Today, there are no permanent rivers and lakes in the region, and only about one millimeter of rainfall per year occurs.
Underground pipelines carry fossil water from sandstone aquifers to more populated cities on Libya's Mediterranean coast. Known as the "Great Man-Made River," the pipeline network is considered one of the largest irrigation projects in the world, built in the 1980s and 1990s to transport water from aquifers to large cities such as Tripoli and Benghazi. It is estimated that the Great Man-made River provides 70% of all water in Libya.
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