Therefore the watery ponds here is a true natural wonder. All of the lakes except Lake Teli are fresh. It is an unusual phenomenon, since most ponds in the deserts are saline, so that it is preserved from evaporating. It is due to the underground aquifers, sand and thick reeds that help to keep water fresh. The area looks like a fairy-tale like oasis, surrounded with lush greenery and palm trees in the middle of a dry sandy landscape.
Only about tourists visit the site annually. The location is no doubt very beautiful, but getting there might be a challenging adventure, which can also be a good thing.
Which came first? Tierney suggests researchers could use mathematical models that compare the impact hunter-gatherers would have on the environment versus that of pastoralists herding animals. For such models it would be necessary to have some idea of how many people lived in the Sahara at the time, but Tierney is sure there were more people in the region than there are today, excepting coastal urban areas.
Wright sees an even broader message in this type of study. Some of these can be good for us, but some have really threatened the long-term sustainability of the Earth. Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others.
One of the world's most iconic deserts was once lush and green. What happened? Applying our selection criteria , we located the many different settlements. We are thus able to observe changes in size occurring in the Oases, to detect silting up processes now mostly due to the decrease of water resources and to witness — however indirectly — the attachment of local communities to places made progressively inhospitable by global warming, a distinctive trait of many such communities, who clearly buck the trend of emigration as a forced choice.
The current version of the Atlas of Saharan and Arabian Oases , which shall be further developed in order to attain progressively more exhaustive classifications, is intended to provide a starting point for comparative studies of social-environmental changes in that vast area of the world characterised by extreme aridity.
Studies which are necessary to elaborate those pilot interventions, which are able to implement appropriate prevention and mitigation measures, extendable to other Oases where people are facing similar emergencies. When consulting the Database sheet, available when the Oasis — via Google Maps — is located on the Atlas map, it can be noted that many actions fostered by institutional agents, research centres and international associations, have converged in the same areas: the most accessible and famous Oases.
The interactive exploration, conducted via the Atlas of Saharan and Arabian Oases , enables a deeper understanding of the local context, and the discovery of smaller and lesser-known Oases — a first step towards the formulation of intervention strategies applicable also to areas considered, until recently, to be marginal.
Such areas are, in fact, home to several Oases, sitting on the edge of porous national borders drawn across the desert. These are settlements inhabited by ancient communities preserving unique hospitality traditions, indigenous culture and extraordinary historic landscapes, which not only act as a stronghold against climate change but also offer a precious contribution to the safety of the Mediterranean region, counteracting the dominance of criminal organisations in those vast uninhabited areas.
Sites where ingenious water-capture systems made it possible to cultivate date palm trees. Oases whose original architectural heritage — today severely endangered and close to disappearing — consists of buildings made either of raw earth or stone. Thousand-year, or hundred-year old Oases, of varying size, founded at the latest at the beginning of the XX Century, where indigenous knowledge and practices are handed down from generation to generation.
In some instances we find vast areas with thousands of inhabitants scattered over various villages, in others the population is limited to 30 people, the minimum number adopted by LabOasis Foundation as its survey criteria. The production cycle includes agriculture and pastoralism, the underlying activities for the integrated economy which is typical of the Oasis, where, in any event, date palm tree cultivation is the mainstay.
The origins of the traditional Oasis date back to the Late Neolithic in arid and hyper arid environment. Down the line, a specific agro-pastoral economy has developed itself, based on the cultivation of the date palm tree, thanks to the evolution of sophisticated techniques of water catchment. In order to survive in an environment that has become hostile as a result of climate change, the first inhabitants of the Oases choose four different sites where they will be able to retrieve the most precious natural resource for life: water.
These are slopes and mountain terracing, or large canyons carved by prehistoric rivers, as well as seas of sand or stone, and the edges of large geological depressions, those sites which together constitute and make the hydrographic network of prehistoric times still visible today. It is indeed in each of these different contexts that is successfully devised a specific technique for the collection of the hydric resource.
LabOasis Foundation therefore offers a guideline referring to the primal heritage of knowledge and techniques of water catchment and management. Thanks to this typological classification it is possible to associate different communities, in eleven nations and in remote and distant places, on the basis of the same heritage of ancestral knowledges that has guaranteed life and prosperity across the centuries.
When the hydro-geo-morphological conformation is not univocal, we will find mixed techniques of water catchment and in that case the typology attributed to that specific Traditional Oasis takes into account the prevailing original technique.
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