Water in the Eastern Desert of Egypt is 200 thousand years old

Although Egypt is not facing current problems of fresh water, the future of climate change in the Arab region all dictates that water should be exploited in the best possible way, because a day may come and the conflict will intensify.

For this reason, a team from the University of Delaware, led by researcher at the Faculty of Earth, Oceans and the Environment, Mahmoud Sharif, decided to use chlorine isotopes to examine groundwater in the eastern desert of Egypt to determine its exact age.

Unexpected results

Determining the age of groundwater is a good tool for identifying other important criteria, such as knowledge of the amount of water available in the layers of the earth, as well as the knowledge of the speed of its renewal, which in turn helps to develop more precise water policies to supply the population with fresh water.

According to the new study, the team looked for a counterpart to the element chlorine called "chlorine 31", in 29 samples from the wells of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, during a scientific mission in Egypt.

This element has a half-life of about 300,000 years, which means that it must pass to decompose half the amount of the element, which is an important phenomenon because it can reveal the decay rates of the element with time and thus the age of the water accompanying it.

The findings, published recently in the journal Nature and Planetarium Science Litters, came in contrast to the expected. Although the shallow ground water examined by the team was supposed to be between 50 and 100 years old, the team found signs of water more than 200,000 years old.

Desert Tanks

This does not mean that the water is 200 thousand years old, but it points to another important finding: shallow water has been mixed up with more deep reservoirs, which means that this may be a golden opportunity to track those waters and find deep reservoirs instead of drilling wells at the cost of High.

According to the new study, these shallow groundwater is formed by rain, then moves on the Nile River, and takes about 50 to 100 years to reach it, while the research team believes that the deeper water was stored in the ground when the atmosphere was wet and rainy Hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The Delaware research team hopes that these results will help identify deepwater aquifers, which may help the Egyptian administration draw up a more efficient and cost-effective water plan. The Egyptian Eastern Desert, although dry, receives more rain than Western Sahara , Making it more interesting to researchers.