BU team discovers hope for Darfur

Ancient reservoir may mean water

By April Yee, Globe Correspondent  |  July 18, 2007

In the dry wasteland of Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region, geologist Farouk El-Baz says he has discovered the imprint of an ancient underground lake as large as Massachusetts.

The find, if found to be legitimate upon drilling, could make possible the construction of 1,000 wells, a resource that would be vital to agriculture and humanitarian efforts.

Baz hopes it could also bring peace to an area mired in bloodshed, warfare some say was triggered by drought.

"It is dry desolation," Baz said in a telephone interview. "It's just a forbidding desert. Without water, it is a scary place."

By scouring satellite and radar images this past year, Baz said, he and a team of 20 other Boston University researchers identified possible streams running from a 5,000-year-old lake, which was once replenished by rain and is now obscured by the arid sands of northern Darfur.

Under the sand, the geologist says, a layer of sandstone hundreds of feet deep might hold water that could replenish the region for a century.

In June, he said, he showed Sudanese officials images of what appears to be an underground lake. Officials from neighboring Egypt, where Baz helped make a similar find in the 1980s, have pledged to donate workers and equipment to drill 20 wells in Sudan.

Baz plans to return to Sudan in November, when he will scout sites by helicopter.

He cited UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's editorial in the June 16 edition of the Washington Post linking the violence in Darfur to climate change. In the piece, Ban said camel herders replenished themselves at the farmers' wells and grazed on their lands, until the rains stopped. Then, farmers fenced their land for fear it would be ruined by passing herds, he wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," he wrote.

Darfur activist Eric Reeves, a literature professor at Smith College in Northampton, said water sources would be critical to improve agriculture and rebuild society. But he said that adding resources in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands have died, would not relieve victims of "the politics of a genocidal regime."

"What you see is not simply a competition for the scarce resources of Darfur," Reeves said in a telephone interview. "If we want to look at the violence in Darfur, we don't look underground, we look at the political realities that exist today."

Baz, who worked on NASA's Apollo program, said he first suspected Sudan might hold an ancient lake while conducting similar research on Egypt. That project resulted in construction of 500 wells in an arid region of his home country.

April Yee can be reached at ayee@globe.com.