Word: nile
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Egypt, wrote the Greek historian Herodotus, is the gift of the Nile. He was right; Egypt-or at least its most populous and fertile area-was formed by the rich silt washed down from the East African highlands by the waters of the Nile. But which Nile? According to Egypt's leading geologist, Rushdi Said, 55, the present-day Nile is a relative newcomer to Egypt, having been around for only 30,000 years. Before that, he says, at least four different Niles had flowed through-and then disappeared from-the river basin...
...some of his core samples, Said was puzzled to find a layer of alluvial (deposited by running water) sediment at a depth of 450 ft., well below the level of the modern Mediterranean Sea. Convinced that such deposits could not have been left by today's Nile, Said began looking into the possibility that they were traces of an earlier river...
Said's study took him along both banks of the Nile and deep into the deserts. He studied the magnetism of rocks to determine when they had been formed, used radioactive dating methods to determine the age of soil samples and fossils and checked other geological records, such as sea-floor samples from the Mediterranean. As a result of his research, Said has traced the history of the Nile back better than 5 million years, and identified at least five different rivers that flowed during that interval. They...
After several days of sight-seeing and bad food, the Harvard heavyweight crew placed third in a field of six in the Nile Festival Regatta at Cairo, Egypt, on December...
...element has recently been injected into this depressing scene: hope that things can be better. For the first time in El Bahu's history, there is a water faucet in the village and the people have clean water to drink instead of the silt-heavy Nile. Only a few hundred yards away, the people can see power lines bringing electricity generated by the Aswan High Dam 500 miles to the south. Within a year they too will have light for their houses. As a result, there is a new kind of farmer in the Nile delta, who buys...