A bit of a stretch on the relevance front, but it might be of interest to anyone interested in north east African prehistoric climate: Researchers at the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing used recently acquired topographic data from satellites to reveal a now dry, ancient mega-lake in the Darfur province of northwestern Sudan. Drs. Eman Ghoneim and Farouk El-Baz made the finding while investigating Landsat images and Radarsat data. Radar waves are able to penetrate the fine-grained sand cover in the hot and dry eastern Sahara to reveal buried features. . . . As proven by El-Baz in Egypt, just north of Darfur, former lakes in this part of the Sahara are underlain by vast amounts of groundwater. His earlier detection of the 'East Uweinat' basin in southwestern Egypt – where the groundwater rises to 25 meters below the surface – resulted in the drilling of 500 wells to irrigate 100,000 acres of agricultural land."
A paper detailing the discovery will be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Remote Sensing.
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