Word: aridity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...decent human being. Ditto the rest of the staff (exemplary actors all) at the Cull-Loomis School of English for Foreigners. Call it cul-de-sac for short. "Teaching foreigners is a job for failures," says one. Still, in a period of four years, life does seep into the arid crevices of their existence. There are births, marriages, deaths, philanderings and conversions...
...Jonglei project, named after the nearly inaccessible province it crosses, is being built to carry needed water to Sudan's arid north and to Egypt. The channel could irrigate some 600,000 acres of land by diverting 30% of the flow of the White Nile River, as much as 5.2 billion gal. of water a day, around the Sudd, a vast swampland in southern Sudan...
...hostile wasteland of flat sands and marching dunes, where the temperatures have soared to 122° F, and the rain falls only once in 30 to 50 years. But for thousands of years, there have been tales that the Sahara's arid surface concealed a "large river without water." Last week a team of scientists from the U.S. and Egypt announced that they had definitive evidence that long ago a region of the vast desert in southern Egypt and northern Sudan was a lacy network of major water ways. The proof: radar images of the Sahara taken...
Geologists believe that radar scanning will be valuable in detecting modern waterways lying near the surface in arid areas. "If you want to look for water in the desert," says Breed, "you would look for that type of site where ground water intersects the surface." For archaeologists, the technique may help determine sites of early human habitation near former rivers and lakes. And, by indicating telltale subsurface features, it may prove a boon for geologists surveying for oil and minerals...
...concentrate and get much more coverage of the Sahara region." There is even talk of more radar missions to other planets. Radar pictures, which have already revealed some of the secrets under the clouds of Venus, may help scientists learn how planets developed. First choice would be Mars. The arid red planet's surface is etched with channels remarkably similar to those found beneath the surface of the Sahara...