Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hunting dog in every man's yard. The canals are thick with lily pads and anglers, and the talk is of the upcoming opening of teal season. (During the Iranian crisis, it was locally claimed that ten Cajuns could have saved the day if you put them in the desert and told them 1) Iranians were out of season, 2) there was a two-bag limit and 3) they taste good in gumbo...
Controversy sticks as closely to Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as the bodyguards who follow him everywhere. In the past it has stalked his political and military moves; now it is tracking him into the desert, where hydrology rather than revolutionary politics has captured his interest. In a scheme, large even by colonel's standards, Libya is gearing up to mine water from beneath the Sahara Desert and pipe it hundreds of miles to the Mediterranean littoral, where there is an increasingly serious water shortage. The program is not only hugely expensive but also controversial. Says Brian Smith...
...wide pipes, as much as is carried by a major river. Put another way, the Libyans will be pumping more than twice as much water a day as the present volume of OPEC's daily oil production. Some 2,500 miles of pipeline will stretch from the desert to the coast. The branches serving Tripoli alone will be more than 1,200 miles long, a distance roughly equal to that between Switzerland and Scotland...
...environmental cost of plumbing the desert water reserves may be considerable. Estimates of the amount of fossil water beneath the Sahara vary widely, as do calculations about the rate of replenishment through flash floods, which turn desert wadis into raging torrents. Says Hydrologist Smith: "It is a one-off use of the resource, and only a short-term solution to the problem." Indeed, some scientists say it is impossible to know for sure whether the desert water will flow for 200, 50 or just 20 years...
There is also concern that tapping the deep aquifers will cause smaller pockets of water closer to the surface to disappear, along with scattered oases, on which Bedouin tribes depend for survival. "You may completely depopulate a large area of desert and end a way of life that has existed for millenniums," says Debney...