End of Darfur crisis lies in water for scientist

Farouk El-Baz says he can solve the crisis in Darfur.

Students and faculty gathered to hear his solution yesterday in his lecture, "When the Sahara was Green," sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, the geology and geophysics department, and the Middle Eastern and Islamic studies program.

This interdisciplinary sponsorship is evidence that the crisis, and El-Baz's discovery, has geological, political, and humanitarian implications.

El-Baz, an Egyptian scientist and director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, is famour for his "1,000 Wells for Darfur" initiative, which he proposed to Sudan President Omar Al Bashir as a solution to the water shortage in Darfur, the troubled region in northwestern Sudan.

Experts cite the lack of rainfall in Darfur as one of the driving forces behind the initial fighting between settled farmers and nomadic herders.

El-Baz's initiative includes the building of wells to utilize the water supply from the ancient underground mega lake in northern Darfur, which he discovered along with researcher and professor Eman Ghoneim.

El-Baz used remote sensing in his discovery in a region riddled by ongoing violence. He has experience in this area, having worked with NASA's Apollo Program of lunar exploration.

He used satellite data to look at the surface, and radar data to show the rain features below the sand.

Then, he was able to map the course of river-carried water from higher topography to lower topography. He also employed, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission technology (STRM), to give the lake a three-dimensional view.

He then mapped the edges of the lake and indicated the highest point where water used to be. He did all this from the laboratories thousands of miles away from Darfur.

Al Bashir has endorsed El-Baz's discovery, calling for aid to pay for the drilling of wells from a lake that is the size of Massachusetts in one of the driest parts of the world.

According to an article from EurekAlert.com, Dr. Mahmoud Abu Zeid, minister of water resources and irrigation from the government of Egypt, has pledged to drill the initial 20 wells. The United Nations mission in Sudan also plans to drill wells.

"If it's possible to actually bring water to the surface with the help of the world community, I think this could be a blessing. But international involvement here is key," said Ali Banuazizi, a professor in the political science department.

El-Baz explained the background of the conflict as a way to understand the mega-lake's potential to end the crisis.

"In this particular case, the trouble in Darfur started due to a scarcity of water," El-Baz said. "There was a movement of people from marginal lands that used to get rain. Then droughts hit and the problem began because nomadic tribes that used to go to the wells at will returned and found that the sedentary farming population had fenced off the wells. There was no place then for the nomads to get water," he said.

"Nomads don't understand land as something that you can possess. Then the nomads started the fight basically to kick sedentary farmers out of their land and they did it by burning their fences and homes," El Baz said.

"If you find water from geological ingenuity - enough for the farmers and the nomads, and to develop the region economically - you'd solve the basic problem," he said.

Boston College geology professor Noah Snyder cited El-Baz as an "international expert" in remote sensing. Snyder also recognized the unique nature of El-Baz's geological discovery. "The humanitarian connection here is unusual on some level," Snyder said.

John Ebel, BC geology professor, sees the connection between geology and society. Ebel cited the search for natural resources like oil, groundwater, and mineral deposits of precious metals as other geological endeavors with societal implications.

Within BC's geology department, research with real-world applications is also being conducted, said Ebel. He mentioned the work of professor Amy Frappier, who is studying cave formations in Central America and its history of hurricanes. "If we want to predict the Earth's future, we need to know its past," Ebel said.

El-Baz confirmed the necessity for field visits to confirm the potential of his remote sensing discovery when he responded to a question after his lecture from a geology professor.

"We need to go there to sample the land as a part of the selection of well sites," he said.

"Whether there is water or not, we can't say. How deep it is, we can't say. This will come out in the drilling. I can only make a similarity to the case in Egypt because it is the same kind of rock, in the same kind of environmental conditions, developed in the same processes," he said.

The case in Egypt that El-Baz referred to is the East Uweinat basin in southwestern Egypt, which resulted in the drilling of over 150 wells to irrigate up to 150,000 acres of farms.

"The water is much cleaner than the Nile water and much sweeter than bottled water because it seeped through the sandstone so it comes out of the ground cool, better than any water you'd drink from the bottle," El-Baz said of the water from the East Uweinat basin.

"There is no reason to believe that [the case in the Sudan] is different [from the case in Egypt]," he said.

In terms of a timeline for putting his discovery to use in Darfur, El-Baz anticipated it would be "three years until complete fruition." He has yet to determine the cost of the project.