Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Flooding of the Sahara An Account of the Proposed Plan for Opening Central Africa to Commerce by Sahara Sea. The Sahara Sea was the name of a hypothetical macro-engineering project which proposed flooding endorheic basins in the Sahara Desert with waters from the Atlantic Ocean or Mediterranean Sea. The goal of this unrealized project was to create an inland sea that would cover the substantial areas of the Sahara Desert which lie below sea level, bringing humid air, rain, and agriculture deep into the desert. Contents. History 19th century 20th century 21st century Appearances in literature Other desert flooding projects References. The possibility of such a project was raised several times by different scientists and engineers during the late 19th century and early 20th century, primarily from European colonial powers in Africa. [1] [2] The concept of a flooded Sahara was also featured in novels of the time. [3] History. 19th century. In 1877 the Scottish entrepreneur and abolitionist Donald Mackenzie was the first to propose the creation of a Sahara Sea. Mackenzie's idea was to cut a channel from one of the sand-barred lagoons north of Cape Juby, south to a large plain which Arab traders had identified to him as El Djouf. [4] [5] Mackenzie believed this vast region was up to 61 metres (200 ft) below sea level and that flooding it would create an inland sea of 155,400 square kilometres (60,000 sq mi) suited to commercial navigation and even agriculture. He further believed that geological evidence suggested this basin had once been connected to the Atlantic via a channel near the Saguia el-Hamra. He proposed that this inland sea, if augmented with a canal, could provide access to the Niger River and the markets and rich resources of West Africa. [5] There are several small depressions in the vicinity of Cape Juby; at 55 m below sea level, the Sebkha Tah [6] is the lowest and largest. But it covers less than 250 km² and is 500 km north of the geographical area identified as El Djouf (also known as the Majabat al-Koubra [7] ) which has an average elevation of 320m. Mackenzie never travelled in this area but had read of other sub-sea level desert basins in present-day Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt similar to those found near Cape Juby. [5] These basins contain seasonally dry salt lakes, known as chotts or sebkhas. Map of Tunisia illustrating the area of Rourdaire's proposed Sahara Sea. François Elie Roudaire, a French geographer, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, a diplomat influential in the creation of the Suez Canal, proposed this area for the creation of an inland sea in 1878. Roudaire and de Lesseps proposed that a channel be cut from the Gulf of Gabès in the Mediterranean to the Chott el Fejej [8] which would allow the sea to drain into these basins. They were not specific in the area such a sea would cover (although subsequent analyses suggested that it would be considerably smaller than Mackenzie's proposal at only 8,000 square kilometres (3,100 sq mi) in area), but argued that the new inland sea would improve the quality of weather on the European continent. [1] [2] [9] The estimated cost of the Roudaire project was $30,000,000 at the time. [9] While Roudaire and de Lesseps were optimistic about the weather effects that such an inland sea would produce in Europe, others were not as hopeful. Alexander William Mitchinson argued that flooding substantial areas would create disease-ridden swamps. [1] [10] Others were critical of the feasibility of the project or the proposal to join the sea at El Djouf with the sea in what is now Tunisia and Algeria. [1] The project was ultimately rejected by the French Government and funding was withdrawn when surveys revealed that many areas were not below sea level as had been believed. [2] [11] 20th century. The proposal to create a Sahara Sea was revived in the early 1900s by French professor Edmund Etchegoyen. Around 1910, Etchegoyen proposed that a longer and deeper channel could be constructed. He argued that such a sea could be a boon for colonization and could potentially produce an inland sea half the size of the Mediterranean. [12] This proposal was considered by the French government but also rejected. Critics noted that, while some parts of the Sahara Desert were indeed below sea level, much of the Sahara Desert was above sea level. This, they said, would produce an irregular sea of bays and coves; it would also be considerably smaller than estimates by Etchegoyen suggested. [1] Map of the Qattara Depression illustrating the proposed routes of canals or tunnels linking it to the Mediterranean. A proposal similar to that of Roudaire and de Lesseps was raised by members of Operation Plowshare, an American idea to use nuclear explosives in civil engineering projects such as the Qattara Depression Project. [13] It was also suggested that nuclear explosives might be detonated to create a channel from the Mediterranean to the chotts of Tunisia. [11] [14] This proposal was abandoned, [11] however, with the signing of various treaties prohibiting peaceful nuclear explosions. [13] 21st century. The project regained steam in the mid 2010s with the creation of the association Cooperation Road [15] which in 2018 obtained the approval of the Tunisian government. [16] Appearances in literature. The notion of a Sahara Sea has been featured several times in literature, most notably in Jules Verne's last novel, Invasion of the Sea , which directly referred to the plan of Roudaire and de Lesseps. [3] The idea of a flooded Sahara Desert also occurs in The Secret People by John Wyndham. Other desert flooding projects. Since the late 19th century there have been proposals to connect Lake Eyre in the South Australian desert to the ocean via canal. [17] In 1905, engineers working on an irrigation canal in southern California accidentally released the waters of the Colorado River into a formerly dry basin, creating a large saline lake known as the Salton Sea. Although the lake has shrunk considerably since its creation, it remains the largest lake in the state of California. Related Research Articles. Algeria comprises 2,381,741 square kilometers of land, more than four-fifths of which is desert, in northern Africa, between Morocco and Tunisia. It is the largest country in Africa. Its Arabic name, Al Jazair, derives from the name of the capital Algiers, after the small islands formerly found in its harbor. It has a long Mediterranean coastline. The northern portion, an area of mountains, valleys, and plateaus between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert, forms an integral part of the section of North Africa known as the Maghreb. This area includes Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. Tunisia is a country in Northern Africa, bordering the Mediterranean Sea, having a western border with Algeria (965 km) and south-eastern border with Libya (459 km) where the width of land tapers to the south-west into the Sahara. The country has north, east and complex east-to- north coasts including the curved Gulf of Gabès, which forms the western part of Africa's Gulf of Sidra. Most of this greater gulf forms the main coast of Libya including the city of Sirte which shares its root name. The country's geographic coordinates are 34°00′N 9°00′E . Tunisia occupies an area of 163,610 square kilometres, of which 8,250 are water. The principal and reliable rivers rise in the north of the country with a few notable exceptions from north-east Algeria and flow through the northern plain where sufficient rainfall supports diverse plant cover and irrigated agriculture. Lake Chad is a historically large, shallow, endorheic lake in Africa, which has varied in size over the centuries. According to the Global Resource Information Database of the United Nations Environment Programme, it shrank by as much as 95% from about 1963 to 1998, but "the 2007 (satellite) image shows significant improvement over previous years." Lake Chad is economically important, providing water to more than 30 million people living in the four countries surrounding it on the central part of the Sahel. It is the largest lake in the Chad Basin. Cape Juby is a cape on the coast of southern Morocco, near the border with Western Sahara, directly east of the Canary Islands. Ferdinand Marie, vicomte de Lesseps , GCSI was a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869 joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia. An endorheic basin is a limited drainage basin that normally retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but converges instead into lakes or swamps, permanent or seasonal, that equilibrate through evaporation. Such a basin may also be referred to as a closed or terminal basin or as an internal drainage system or interior drainage basin . In geology, a chott or shott is a salt lake in Africa's Maghreb that stays dry for much of the year but receives some water in the winter. The elevation of a chott surface is controlled by the position of the water table and capillary fringe, with sediment deflation occurring when the water table falls and sediment accumulation occurring when the water table rises. They are formed—within variable shores—by the spring thaw from the Atlas mountain range, along with occasional rainwater or groundwater sources in the Sahara, such as the Bas Saharan Basin.