tagged w/ Sahara
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BAMAKO – DESERT rebels have launched a revolutionary war in the Sahara. The fight for a free Azawad has turned into an armed conflict after brutal attacks on the population by the US-backed state of Mali. WITH the liberation of Timbuktu, rebels have proclaimed an astonishing victory in the Sahara Desert. The political bureau of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (Mouvement National De Liberation de l'Azawad - MNLA) issued a statement on Sunday April 1 speaking of an unprecedented day in the history of its peopl - 'Following the complete liberation of the Azawad territory and given the strong wish of the international community … the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) has unilaterally declared the end of its military operations as of midnight Thursday, April 5' -------- http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/43058-tuaregs-azawad-declaresd-victoryBAMAKO – DESERT rebels have launched a revolutionary war in the Sahara. The... more
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worrg
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1 month ago
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La notizia è di quelle destinate a far rumore e pensare, dati che lasciano stupefatti sugli scenari climatici europei del prossimo futuro. Meno di un secolo, sarà necessario secondo le proiezioni sui cambiamenti climatici e l' innalzamento della temperature, presentate durante I Colloqui Internazionali AIC 2011, per ridisegnare la cartografia continentale.La notizia è di quelle destinate a far rumore e pensare, dati che lasciano... more
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July 22 2011. A date for humanity to remember. NATO hit the Libyan water supply pipeline. It will take months to repair. Then on Saturday they hit the pipeline factory producing pipes to repair it. The Libyan leader Moammar Al Gaddafi informed members of the Security Council in his message that the alliance decided to carry out mass murder against the Libyan people by targeting their only drinking water source, where billions were invested and without it life stops in Libya. He wondered what's the relation between this factory and the protection of civilians that NATO claims it is carrying out? http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/42990-nato-attack-great-man-made-riverJuly 22 2011. A date for humanity to remember. NATO hit the Libyan water supply... more
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worrg
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added this
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10 months ago
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NATO-led air strikes on Libya could trigger a human and environmental disaster if they were to damage the country's massive Great Man-Made River (GMMR) project, which facilitates agricultural production in the middle of the Sahara Desert and provides drinking water for over 70% of the Libyan population.
The Great Man-Made River (GMMR) project – globally recognised as the largest water transport system in the world – is among the lesser-known projects undertaken by Muammar Gaddafi, who himself describes the undertaking as the eighth wonder of the world.
The Western world is virtually unaware that underneath the North African country's arid landscape lies a true ocean of high quality fresh water, discovered by chance in the 1950s as part of efforts to find oil in southern Libya.
The artificial river project was conceived in the 1960s and launched in 1984. Today, a total of 4,000 kilometres of pipelines of four metres in diameter have been laid at a depth of two to three metres, running across the country from south to north.
High-quality fossil water is being pumped from hundreds of wells hundreds of metres deep and transported from the south to populated coastal areas in the north, where most of the country's six million inhabitants live and work.
Farming in the desert
At a cost of over €23 billion, paid for with Libyan petrodollars, and owned by the Great Man-Made River Project Authority, the most expensive irrigation project in history is part of Gaddafi's plan to make Libya self-sufficient in food by irrigating remote agricultural areas in the Sahara Desert.
According to the European Commission, "over 70% of the water from this man-made river system is intended for agricultural purposes". 130,000 hectares of agricultural land are expected to derive from implementing the project, the EU executive added.
The underground ocean, called the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS), is the world's largest fossil water aquifer scheme to date. Libya shares it with three other African nations – Chad, Sudan and Egypt. According to the UN, at current extraction rates the NSAS is not likely to be depleted for a thousand years.
Late last year, Turkish and Libyan delegations met in Tripoli to discuss the possibility of allocating 60,000 hectares of agricultural land in Libya for Turkish investors to produce wheat and corn.
Emergency meeting
As NATO bombs continue to fall, an emergency meeting was held on Sunday (3 April) by the managing committee of the artificial river project to alert the world about the gravity of the potential consequences if the infrastructure is damaged, according to press sources.
At a press conference held in the project's ultra-modern control room in the southern suburbs of Tripoli, the project leader, Abdelmajid Gahoud warned against a "human and environmental disaster" if the infrastructure is affected by NATO air raids, AFP reported.
Gahoud told journalists that if any part of the infrastructure is damaged, the whole network will be affected and the flow of water that might escape would deprive 4.5 million Libyans of drinking water.
In a joint statement issued after the emergency meeting, the Libyan Secretariat of General People's Committee (Ministry) on Agriculture and the executive committee of the Great Man-Made River urged the UN and its specialised food and environmental agencies to demand that Western coalition forces stop aerial bombing in the regions of Brega, Ajdabia and Benghazi, in the north and east, where the artificial river system is installed, according to press sources.NATO-led air strikes on Libya could trigger a human and environmental disaster if they... more
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Sahara India Pariwar, the conglomerate run by Indian billionaire Subrata Roy, is all set to buy the landmark Grosvenor House hotel in central London, which was once home to the Duke of Westminster.
http://www.indiareport.com/India-usa-uk-news/toi/Business/41762Sahara India Pariwar, the conglomerate run by Indian billionaire Subrata Roy, is all... more
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Deep in the Sahara desert are honeybees that have remained isolated from all other bees for at least 5,000 years.
The bees arrived at Kufra in Libya when the Sahara was still a green savannah, and have survived ever since around an oasis in the desert, over 1,000km from their nearest neighbouring bees.
So concludes a new study which has analysed the bees' genetics.
The Kufra honeybees are so isolated they remain free of a parasitic mite that threatens bees around the world.
Details of the discovery are published in the journal Conservation Genetics.
Around 10,000 years ago, the Sahara was a green savannah, a habitat well suited to honeybees (Apis mellifera).
Today, the Sahara is inhospitable to honeybees, which can't survive in the large sand deserts that lack any vegetation.
HONEYBEES
See 3D images of life inside a live honeybee colony
Our bees are buzzing off. But why?
Join the BBC's Bee Part of It campaign
Watch extraordinary footage of honeybees filmed by the BBC
However, honeybees do survive in many oases that litter the desert.
Most are maintained by local beekeepers that keep the insects for honey production and to pollinate oasis plants.
But some wild populations of bees survive.
One such group lives at the desert oasis at Kufra in southeast Libya, while another lives at an oasis at Brak to the west of the country.
Unique traits
Dr Taher Shaibi of the Al-Fatah University in Tripoli, Libya and Professor Robin Moritz of Martin Luther University at Halle-Wittenberg, Germany analysed DNA from 16 colonies of bees at Kufra, Brak and from three sites along Libya's northern coast.
They examined 15 genetic markers which indicate the mating frequency, colony density and gene diversity of the bees in each colony and the extent to which their populations have changed over time.
As expected, the results showed that the coastal bees have high levels of genetic diversity, due to the intensive apiculture industry there, which allows large numbers of bees to intermingle.
Oases of agriculture at Kufra, Libya
The colony at Brak was also relatively diverse.
That is because Brak has a honey season, which encourages coastal bee keepers to visit, bringing their own bees to the oasis.
Though honeybees living at Kufra have colonies of a similar density to bees elsewhere, certain genetic traits appeared in the Kufra bees at much high frequencies, with some being unique.
That shows that the Kufra bees have remained isolated from all others for at least 5,000 years and perhaps up to 10,000 years, since the moment they were cut off by the creation of the Sahara desert.
Bees living at Kufra are also free from the Varroa destructor parasitic mite, which is decimating colonies around the world and has been implicated in a global decline of honeybee populations.
"The oasis can only be free of the Varroa mite if perfect isolation is ensured, even in times of modern transport," the researchers write.
Genetic source
Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers' analysis also showed that the Kufra bees are not suffering any ill effects, caused by inbreeding, from their isolation.
That indicates that the oasis supports a healthy population size.
SOURCES
Visit Conservation Genetics to read more about the honeybees of Kufra
The Kufra bees could also be a source of new genetic traits that could be useful to beekeepers elsewhere, the researchers suggest.
But to maintain these valuable traits, it is crucial that the Kufra bees are preserved, with foreign bees being kept away from the oasis.Deep in the Sahara desert are honeybees that have remained isolated from all other... more
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It takes courage and belief to mount an expedition. It is to easy to listen to doubters that convince us that our dreams are impossible or beyond us. Sometimes expeditions are successful and sometimes not but to me it is the journey from dream to reality that is the most inspiring. I love to see people take a leap of faith and make it happen. This film is about an eccentric British expedition to launch a flying car!
I hope you enjoy this incredible expedition video – Please take a moment to comment afterwards and give your thoughts on the film or even the future of flying cars as expedition transport?It takes courage and belief to mount an expedition. It is to easy to listen to... more
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Sahrawi refugees are among the longest warehoused refugee groups in the world. In a situation lasting over 30 years, more than 90,000 refugees wait in four remote refugee camps -- El Aaiun, Awserd, Smara, and Dakhla -- in the desolate Sahara desert in southwest Algeria.
The international community has all but forgotten these men, women and children, who fled their homes in the mid-seventies because of fighting between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front, a rebel group who seeks independence for the Western Sahara. The refugees remain trapped to this day in refugee camps in a remote part of the Sahara often referred to as "The Devil's Garden."
What can we americans do about this? Since we're so privileged to be in America and not in their shoes.... Read the full article to fully understand why we must help.Sahrawi refugees are among the longest warehoused refugee groups in the world. In a... more
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"A well-defined plume of dust swept across the entire Atlantic Ocean on June 24, 2009. In this photo-like image taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite in three consecutive overpasses, the dust stretches from its origins in Africa’s Sahara Desert to the Lesser Antilles Islands on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea. Such spectacular dust storms are not uncommon.
Saharan dust often travels across the Atlantic thanks to a hot, dry, dusty layer of air known as the Saharan Air Layer. Extreme daytime heating of the Sahara creates instability in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, lofting dust particles into the air. The dust-laden air layer continues warming as it travels westward across the Sahara. As the Saharan Air Layer moves off the west coast of Africa, it passes over a cooler, wetter layer of air. This temperature inversion (air usually cools with altitude) prevents mixing, enabling the dust layer to travel across the ocean intact. Across the Atlantic, dust brings problems and benefits: respiratory illness and coral bleaching, but also rich soils."
Amazing pictures from SPACE, woohoo! It's crazy how far dust travels around the world!"A well-defined plume of dust swept across the entire Atlantic Ocean on June 24,... more
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A dinosaur-hunting expedition to the Sahara desert involving British scientists has found the fossilised remains of what are thought to be two new species.
The ancient remains discovered in Morocco belong to a giant flying pterosaur and plant-eating sauropod. Initial examinations suggest that both specimens are unknown to science.
They were unearthed during a month-long quest during which the research team braved floods and storms to reach the dig site and then preserve the fossils. The scientists even feared that they would never get the bones out of the desert because they were so heavy that their Land Rover became stuck in sand.
Nizar Ibrahim, of University College Dublin, a leader of the project, said: “There was a point when we wondered if we would make it out of the desert with the [sauropod] bone, but we had worked so hard to find it there was no way I was leaving it behind. It took us five days to get the bone out of the ground and down the mountain – and that was not the end of our problems.”
More info at link.A dinosaur-hunting expedition to the Sahara desert involving British scientists has... more
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European tourists who were kidnapped for 10 days in the Sahara desert have described their experience; one said that at one point she "thought it was all over."European tourists who were kidnapped for 10 days in the Sahara desert have described... more
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rwylie
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added this
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3 years ago
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Can you imagine being able to produce enough water in the Sahara to grow crops there? Can you imagine harnessing sufficient quantities of solar power to supply electricity to cities in Africa and cities in Europe? Can you imagine producing a sustainable bio-fuel that doesn’t impact on world food supplies? Charlie Paton, Michael Pawlyn and Bill Watts can and what’s more they can imagine all these happening in the same place at the same time.
This week this trio of visionaries launched the Sahara Forest Project: their proposal to combine two innovative technologies, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Seawater Greenhouses, to produce renewable energy, water and food in an area of desert known to be one of the hottest places on earth.
Multitasking renewable solutions
It has often been said that there will be no one solution to solving the climate crisis and all those issues that surround it, such as energy sources, food prices and water supply. We need a portfolio of technologies to help us to combat these advancing problems. The Sahara Forest Project is one of the first projects we’ve seen that proposes not only to combine technologies to optimise performance and production, but also aims to tackle all of the serious challenges mentioned above. It is a bold and ambitious plan that, if realised, could have a powerful positive impact not only for the Sahara region, but also for Europe and the rest of the world.
Positive Collaboration
The most exciting aspect of the Sahara Forest Project is not specifically the use of these technologies. We’ve read about Seawater Greenhouses and Concentrated Solar Power and how they’re being used to great effect. It is the fact that they are being used together in the same place, to support each other and optimize their operating capacities to produce energy and water and by proxy vegetation.
This sense of collaboration is echoed in the team of people behind the proposal: an inventor - Charlie Paton, creator of the Seawater Greenhouse; an architect - Michael Pawlyn of Exploration Architecture, previously of Grimshaw and the lead architect on the iconic Eden Project; an engineer - Bill Watts of Max Fordham & Partners, an engineering firm that focuses on energy efficient systems for the built environment. These three men have brought their considerable expertise together to create a truly innovative proposal.
Continued...Can you imagine being able to produce enough water in the Sahara to grow crops there?... more
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The planned project would use solar power to evaporate salt water, generating cool air and pure water thereby allowing food to be grown.
Vast greenhouses that use seawater to grow crops could be combined with solar power plants to provide food, fresh water and clean energy in deserts, under an ambitious proposal from a team of architects and engineers.
The Sahara Forest project would marry huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus the sun's rays and generate heat and electricity. The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and without the need to dig wells for fresh water, which has depleted acquifers in many parts of the world.
*continues*The planned project would use solar power to evaporate salt water, generating cool air... more
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A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.
Researchers discovered the slender arms of the youngsters still extended to the woman in a perpetual embrace.
The remarkable cemetery is providing clues to two civilisations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.
Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find.
Some 200 graves of humans were found during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles.
'Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in the desert,' said Sereno.
'I realized we were in the green Sahara.'
The graveyard, uncovered by hot desert winds, is near what would have been a lake at the time people lived there. It's in a region called Gobero, hidden away in Niger's forbidding Tenere Desert, known to Tuareg nomads as a 'desert within a desert.'
The human remains dated from two distinct populations that lived there during wet times, with a dry period in between.
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More at link.
Few people know that not all that long ago, a few thousand years ago, the Sahara was a lush green garden with girafes, lions, elephants, etc., roaming and prospering in it. There are cave-paintings and carvings on rocks in the Sahara depicting a rich fauna. A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in... more
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A Stone Age graveyard on the shores of an ancient, dried-up lake in the Sahara is brimming with the skeletons of people, fish and crocodiles who thrived when the African desert was briefly green, researchers reported on Thursday.
The 10,000-year-old site in Niger, called Gobero after the Tuareg name for the area, was discovered in 2000 but the group has only now gathered enough information to make a full report, said University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno.
The team stumbled onto the assortment of human and animal bones and artifacts while looking for dinosaur fossils.
"I realized we were in the green Sahara," Sereno, who discovered the site while working for National Geographic, said in a statement.
The site contains at least 200 graves that appear to have been left by two separate settlements 1,000 years apart.
Perhaps the most dramatic is a woman and two children, their arms entwined, laid to rest on a bed of flowers around 5,000 years ago.
The older group were tall, robust hunter-gathers known as Kiffians who apparently abandoned the area during a long drought that dried up the lake around 8,000 years ago, Sereno's team reports in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.
A second group settled in the area between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago, they said. These were Tenerians, smaller, shorter people who hunted, herded and fished.
Both left many artifacts, including tool kits, fishhooks, ceramics and jewelry, the researchers said.
"At first glance, it's hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the same place," said Chris Stojanowski, a bioarchaeologist from Arizona State University who has been working on the site.
The Sahara is the world's largest desert and has been for tens of thousands of years, but changes in the Earth's orbit 12,000 years ago brought monsoons further north for a while.
The team sampled tooth enamel from the skeletons, pollen, bones and examined soil and tools to date the site, artifacts and remains.
"The data from Gobero, when combined with existing sites in North Africa, indicate we are just beginning to understand the complex history of biosocial evolution in the face of severe climate fluctuation in the Sahara," the researchers wrote in their report.A Stone Age graveyard on the shores of an ancient, dried-up lake in the Sahara is... more
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Research at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain life over extensive regions of the North Atlantic OceanResearch at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain... more
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adyen
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added this
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3 years ago
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A "wall of trees" is to be planted to halt the Sahara Desert's gradual creep south. The plans to create a barrier 7,000 kilometres long and 15 kilometres wide across Africa were initially developed in 2005 but will only be put into action in the next few months.
Although funding is still insecure, it is hoped that in time the green belt will also create "reforestation, restoration of natural resources and the eventual development of fishing and livestock breeding," Mariam Aladji Boni Diallo, the Benin-based president of the Cen-Sad summit organising committee told theScience and Development Network.
A report produced by the Observatory of the Sahara and the Sahel outlines a two-stage implementation process involving planting projects beginning either side of Africa. As part of the initial $3 million two-year phase, pilot planting will begin in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal in September. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) hope to finalise similar start plans for the six states in the east Horn of Africa in the next couple of months.A "wall of trees" is to be planted to halt the Sahara Desert's gradual... more
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