One of the largest civic development projects in 42 years of government former president Muammar Gaddafi's Libya was Big Artificial river. Gaddafi dreamed of providing fresh water to all residents of the country and turning the desert into a thriving oasis, providing Libya with its own food products. To make this dream a reality, Gaddafi launched a major technical project consisting of a network of underground pipes. They would carry fresh water from ancient underground aquifers deep in the Sahara to the arid Libyan cities. Gaddafi called it the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Western media rarely mentions it, calling it a “vanity project”, “Gaddafi’s Pet Project” and a “pipe dream” mad dog" But in fact, the Artificial River of Life is a fantastic water delivery system that has changed the lives of Libyans all across the country.

Libya is one of the sunniest and driest countries in the world. There are places where no precipitation has fallen for decades, and even in mountainous areas rain can fall once every 5 to 10 years. Less than 5% of the country receives enough to run Agriculture amount of precipitation. Much of Libya's water supply used to come from desalination plants on the coast, which were expensive and used only locally. There was practically nothing left for irrigation of farmland.


In 1953, during exploration for new oil fields in southern Libya, a huge number of ancient aquifers were discovered. The team of researchers discovered four huge pools with estimated volumes ranging from 4,800 to 20,000 cubic kilometers of water. Most of this water was collected between 38,000 and 14,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age when the Sahara region had a temperate climate.


After Gaddafi seized power in a bloodless coup in 1969, the new government immediately nationalized oil companies and began using oil revenues to drill hundreds of wells to extract water from desert aquifers. Initially, Gaddafi planned to set up large-scale agricultural projects right in the desert, next to water sources. But people refused to move far from their homes, and then he decided to bring water directly to them.


In August 1984, a pipe manufacturing plant was opened and the Great Artificial River of Life project in Libya began. Approximately 1,300 wells, 500 meters deep, were dug into the desert soil to pump water from the underground water reserve. This water was then distributed to 6.5 million people in the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and other places through a network of underground pipes totaling 2,800 km. When the fifth and final phase of the project is completed, the network will consist of 4,000 km of pipes that will cover 155,000 hectares of land. Even with the last two phases unfinished, the Great Artificial River is the largest irrigation project in the world.



The pipeline first reached Tripoli in 1996, at the completion of the first phase of the project. Adam Kuwairi (the main figure behind the project) vividly remembers the impact that fresh water had on him and his family. "Water has changed lives. For the first time in our history there is water for showering, washing and shaving," he told the BBC. “The quality of life has increased by an order of magnitude throughout the country.” The project was recognized internationally, and in 1999 UNESCO awarded the River of Life Prize, recognizing its remarkable work in scientific research on water use in arid areas.





In July 2011, NATO struck a pipeline near Brega, including a pipe factory. They claimed that the factory was used as a military depot and that missiles were launched from there. The pipeline strike deprived 70% of the country's population of water. Civil war has broken out in the country, and the future of the Artificial River of Life project is in jeopardy.

Among the newest conspiracy theories about the actions of the US government, one of the loudest and most recent is the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi not because of oil, but because of a grandiose irrigation project. The project was supposed to turn parched Africa into a prosperous continent, which is very unprofitable for those who make billions from the hunger and thirst of Africans.

For some reason, the construction of the Great Man-Made River in Libya has been deprived of media attention, despite the fact that this structure has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest irrigation project in the world since 2008. But what is important here is not the scale of the construction of the century, but the goals. After all, if Libyan man-made river will be completed, it will transform Africa from a desert into a fertile continent, the same as, for example, Eurasia or America. However, the whole problem is precisely in this very “if”...

In 1953, Libyans, trying to find sources of oil in the south of their country, discovered water: giant underground reservoirs feeding oases. Only a couple of decades later, the residents of Libya realized that they had fallen into their hands with a much greater treasure than black gold. From time immemorial, Africa has been a continent suffering from drought with sparse vegetation, but here literally under our feet there is about 35 thousand cubic kilometers of artesian water. With the appropriate volume, it is possible, for example, to completely flood the territory of Germany (357,021 square kilometers), and the depth of such a reservoir will be about 100 meters. If this water is released to the surface, it will turn Africa into a blooming garden!

This is precisely the idea that came to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Of course, because the territory of Libya is more than 95% desert. Under Gaddafi's patronage, a complex network of pipelines was developed that would deliver water from the Nubian Aquifer to the arid regions of the country. To implement this grandiose plan to Libya from South Korea specialists arrived modern technologies. A plant for the production of reinforced concrete pipes with a diameter of four meters was launched in the city of Al-Buraika. On August 28, 1984, Muammar Gaddafi was personally present at the start of construction of the pipeline.

The eighth wonder of the world

The Great Man-Made River is not without reason called the largest irrigation project in the world. Some even consider it the largest engineering structure on the planet. Gaddafi himself called his creation the eighth wonder of the world. Now this network includes 1,300 wells 500 meters deep, four thousand kilometers of concrete pipes laid underground, a system of pumping stations, storage tanks, control and management centers. Every day, six and a half million cubic meters of water flow through the pipes and aqueducts of the man-made river, supplying the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte, Gharyan and others, as well as the green fields in the middle of the former desert. In the future, the Libyans intended to irrigate 130-150 thousand hectares of cultivated land and, in addition to Libya, include other African countries in this system. Ultimately, Africa would not only cease to be a perpetually starving continent, but would even begin to export barley, oats, wheat and corn itself. The project was planned to be completed in 25 years, but...

Expulsion from Paradise

In early 2011, civil war engulfed Libya, and on October 20, Muammar Gaddafi died at the hands of rebels. But there is an opinion that the real reason for the murder of the Libyan leader was his Great Man-Made River. Firstly, a number of major powers were engaged in supplying food to African countries. Of course, it is completely unprofitable for them to transform Africa from a consumer into a producer. Secondly, due to the growing population on the planet, fresh water is becoming an increasingly valuable resource every year. Many European countries are already experiencing a shortage of drinking water. And here Libya has a source in its hands, which, according to experts, will be enough for the next four to five millennia.

Once, at the ceremonial completion of one of the stages of construction of the Great Man-Made River, Muammar Gaddafi said: “Now, after this achievement, US threats against Libya will double. The Americans will do everything to destroy our work and leave the people of Libya oppressed.” By the way, the heads of many African states were present at this celebration, and the leaders of the Black Continent supported Gaddafi’s initiative. Among them was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Earlier this year, Mubarak was removed from his post as a result of the revolution that suddenly broke out in Egypt. Strange coincidence, isn't it? It is noteworthy that when NATO forces intervened in the Libyan conflict, in order to “protect civilians,” their aircraft attacked the branches of the Great River, pumping stations and destroyed a plant producing concrete pipes.

So, I think it is highly likely that the fight for oil is being replaced by another war - for water. And Gaddafi became the first victim of this war.

Evgenia KURLAPOVA
Mysteries of the 20th century No. 48 (Ukraine) 2011

This is the largest engineering and construction project of our time, thanks to which the country's residents gained access to drinking water and were able to settle in areas where no one had ever lived before. Currently, 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water flow through underground water pipelines every day, which is also used for the development of agriculture in the region. Read on to see how the construction of this grandiose facility took place.
The eighth wonder of the world
The total length of underground communications of the artificial river is close to four thousand kilometers. The volume of soil excavated and transferred during construction - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the building materials spent would be enough to build 16 Cheops pyramids. In addition to pipes and aqueducts, the system includes over 1,300 wells, most of which are more than 500 meters deep. The total depth of the wells is 70 times the height of Everest.


The main branches of the water pipeline consist of concrete pipes 7.5 meters long, 4 meters in diameter and weighing more than 80 tons (up to 83 tons). And each of over 530 thousand of these pipes could easily serve as a tunnel for subway trains.
From the main pipes, water flows into reservoirs built near cities with a volume of 4 to 24 million cubic meters, and from them the local water supply systems of cities and towns begin.
Fresh water enters the water supply system from underground sources located in the south of the country and feeds settlements concentrated mainly near the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, including Largest cities Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. The water is drawn from the Nubian Aquifer, which is the largest known source of fossil fresh water in the world.
The Nubian Aquifer is located in the eastern Sahara Desert over an area of ​​more than two million square kilometers and contains 11 large underground reservoirs. The territory of Libya is located above four of them.
In addition to Libya, several other African states are located on the Nubian layer, including northwestern Sudan, northeastern Chad and most of Egypt.

The Nubian aquifer was discovered in 1953 by British geologists while searching for oil fields. The fresh water in it is hidden under a layer of hard ferruginous sandstone from 100 to 500 meters thick and, as scientists have established, accumulated underground during the period when fertile savannas stretched in place of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent heavy rains.
Most of this water was accumulated between 38 and 14 thousand years ago, although some reservoirs formed relatively recently - around 5000 BC. When the planet's climate changed dramatically three thousand years ago, the Sahara became a desert, but the water that had seeped into the ground over thousands of years had already accumulated in underground horizons.


After the discovery of huge reserves of fresh water, projects for the construction of an irrigation system immediately appeared. However, the idea was realized much later and only thanks to the Government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The project involved the creation of a water pipeline to deliver water from underground reservoirs from the south to the north of the country, to the industrial and more populated part of Libya. In October 1983, Project Management was created and funding began. The total cost of the project at the start of construction was estimated at $25 billion, and the planned implementation period was at least 25 years.
Construction was divided into five phases: the first - the construction of a pipe plant and a 1,200-kilometer-long pipeline with a daily supply of two million cubic meters of water to Benghazi and Sirte; the second is to bring pipelines to Tripoli and provide it with daily supplies of one million cubic meters of water; third - completion of the construction of a water pipeline from the Kufra oasis to Benghazi; the last two are the construction of the western branch to the city of Tobruk and the unification of the branches into a single system near the city of Sirte.


The fields created by the Great Man-Made River are clearly visible from space: in satellite images they appear as bright green circles scattered among grey-yellow desert areas. In the photo: cultivated fields near the Kufra oasis.
Direct construction work began in 1984 - on August 28, Muammar Gaddafi laid the first stone of the project. The cost of the first phase of the project was estimated at $5 billion. The construction of a unique, world's first plant for the production of giant pipes in Libya was carried out by South Korean specialists using modern technologies.
Specialists from the world's leading companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany came to the country. The latest equipment was purchased. To lay concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. Migrant labor from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam was used as the main unskilled labor force.


In 1989, water entered the Ajdabiya and Grand Omar Muktar reservoirs, and in 1991 - into the Al-Ghardabiya reservoir. The first and largest stage was officially opened in August 1991 - water supply began to such large cities as Sirte and Benghazi. Already in August 1996, regular water supply was established in the capital of Libya, Tripoli.


As a result, the Libyan government spent $33 billion on the creation of the eighth wonder of the world, and the financing was carried out without international loans or IMF support. Recognizing the right to water supply as a fundamental human right, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water.
The government also tried not to purchase anything for the project in the “first world” countries, but to produce everything necessary within the country. All materials used for the project were locally produced, and the plant, built in the city of Al-Buraika, produced more than half a million pipes with a diameter of four meters from prestressed reinforced concrete.




Before the construction of the water pipeline began, 96% of Libya's territory was desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life.
After the project was fully completed, it was planned to supply water and cultivate 155 thousand hectares of land.
By 2011, it was possible to establish supplies of 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water to the cities of Libya, providing it to 4.5 million people. At the same time, 70% of the water produced by Libya was consumed in the agricultural sector, 28% by the population, and the rest by industry.
But the government’s goal was not only to fully provide the population fresh water, but also a reduction in Libya’s dependence on imported food, and in the future, the country’s entry into completely its own food production.
With the development of water supply, large agricultural farms were built to produce wheat, oats, corn and barley, which had previously only been imported. Thanks to watering machines connected to the irrigation system, circles of man-made oases and fields with a diameter ranging from several hundred meters to three kilometers have grown in the arid regions of the country.


Measures were also taken to encourage Libyans to move to the south of the country, to the farms created in the desert. However, not everything local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal regions.
Therefore, the country's government turned to Egyptian peasants with an invitation to come to Libya to work. After all, the population of Libya is only 6 million people, while in Egypt there are more than 80 million, living mainly along the Nile. The water pipeline also made it possible to organize resting places for people and animals with water trenches (aryks) brought to the surface on the routes of camel caravans in the Sahara.
Libya has even begun supplying water to neighboring Egypt.


Compared to Soviet irrigation projects implemented in Central Asia for the purpose of irrigating cotton fields, the man-made river project had a number of fundamental differences.
Firstly, to irrigate Libyan agricultural land, a huge underground source was used, rather than a surface and relatively small, compared to the volumes taken. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral environmental disaster.
Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were eliminated, since delivery took place in a closed way, which eliminated evaporation. Devoid of these shortcomings, the created water supply system became an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.
When Gaddafi first started his project, he became the target of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the derogatory stamp “dream in a pipe” appeared in the media of the States and Britain.
But 20 years later, in one of the rare materials dedicated to the success of the project, National Geographic magazine recognized it as “epoch-making.” By this time, engineers from all over the world were coming to the country to gain Libyan experience in hydraulic engineering.
Since 1990, UNESCO has provided assistance in supporting and training engineers and technicians. Gaddafi described the water project as “the strongest answer to America, which accuses Libya of supporting terrorism, saying that we are not capable of anything else.”





Available fresh water resources have long been of interest to transnational corporations. At the same time, the World Bank strongly supports the idea of ​​privatizing fresh water sources, while at the same time doing its best to slow down water projects that dry countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, over the past 20 years, the World Bank and the IMF have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt, and blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile in South Sudan.
Against this background, the resources of the Nubian aquifer are of enormous commercial interest to large foreign corporations, and the Libyan project does not seem to fit into the general scheme of private development of water resources.
Look at these numbers: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the Earth's rivers and lakes, are estimated at 200 thousand cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and all five Great Lakes contain 22.7 thousand. The reserves of the Nubian reservoir are 150 thousand cubic kilometers, that is, they are only 25% less than all the water contained in rivers and lakes.
At the same time, we must not forget that most of the planet’s rivers and lakes are heavily polluted. Scientists estimate the reserves of the Nubian Aquifer to be equivalent to two hundred years of flow of the Nile River. If we take the largest underground reserves found in sedimentary rocks under Libya, Algeria and Chad, then they will be enough to cover all these territories with 75 meters of water.
It is estimated that these reserves will be enough for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.




Before the water pipeline was put into operation, the cost of desalted seawater purchased by Libya was $3.75 per ton. The construction of its own water supply system allowed Libya to completely abandon imports.
At the same time, the sum of all costs for the extraction and transportation of 1 cubic meter of water cost the Libyan state (before the war) 35 American cents, which is 11 times less than before. This was already comparable to the cost of cold tap water in Russian cities. For comparison: the cost of water in European countries is approximately 2 euros.
In this sense, the value of Libyan water reserves turns out to be much higher than the value of the reserves of all its oil fields. Thus, the proven oil reserves in Libya - 5.1 billion tons - at the current price of $400 per ton will amount to about $2 trillion.
Compare them with the cost of water: even based on the minimum 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves amount to 10-15 trillion dollars (at total cost water in the Nubian layer is 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times greater than all Libyan oil reserves. If we start exporting this water in bottled form, the amount will increase many times over.
Therefore, statements according to which military operation in Libya was nothing more than a “war for water”, have quite obvious grounds.


In addition to the political risks outlined above, the Great Artificial River had at least two more. It was the first major project of its kind, so no one could predict with any certainty what would happen when the aquifers began to deplete. Concerns were expressed that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would lead to large-scale ground failures in the territories of several African countries. On the other hand, it was unclear what would happen to the existing natural oases, since many of them were originally fed by underground aquifers. Today, at least the drying up of one of the natural lakes in the Libyan oasis of Kufra is associated precisely with overexploitation of aquifers.
But be that as it may, on this moment The artificial Libyan river is one of the most complex, most expensive and large engineering projects implemented by mankind, but grew out of the dream of one single person “to make the desert green, like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya.”
Modern satellite images show that after the bloody American-European aggression, the round fields in Libya are now quickly turning into desert again...

The Great Man-Made River is considered the largest engineering and construction project of our time. The Great The Manmade River is a huge underground network of water pipelines that daily supplies 6.5 million cubic meters of drinking water to populated areas in the desert regions and coast of Libya. The project is incredibly significant for this country, but it also gives reasons to look at the former leader Libyan Jamahiriya Muammar Gaddafi. Perhaps this is precisely what can explain the fact that the implementation of this project was practically not covered by the media.

The eighth wonder of the world

The total length of underground communications of the artificial river is close to four thousand kilometers. The volume of soil excavated and transferred during construction - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the building materials spent would be enough to build 16 Cheops pyramids. In addition to pipes and aqueducts, the system includes over 1,300 wells, most of which are more than 500 meters deep. The total depth of the wells is 70 times the height of Everest.

The main branches of the water pipeline consist of concrete pipes 7.5 meters long, 4 meters in diameter and weighing more than 80 tons (up to 83 tons). And each of over 530 thousand of these pipes could easily serve as a tunnel for subway trains.

From the main pipes, water flows into reservoirs built near cities with a volume of 4 to 24 million cubic meters, and from them the local water supply systems of cities and towns begin. Fresh water enters the water supply system from underground sources located in the south of the country and feeds settlements concentrated mainly off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, including the largest cities of Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. The water is drawn from the Nubian Aquifer, which is the largest known source of fossil fresh water in the world. The Nubian Aquifer is located in the eastern Sahara Desert over an area of ​​more than two million square kilometers and contains 11 large underground reservoirs. The territory of Libya is located above four of them. In addition to Libya, several other African states are located on the Nubian layer, including northwestern Sudan, northeastern Chad and most of Egypt.

The Nubian aquifer was discovered in 1953 by British geologists while searching for oil fields. The fresh water in it is hidden under a layer of hard ferruginous sandstone from 100 to 500 meters thick and, as scientists have established, accumulated underground during the period when fertile savannas stretched in place of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent heavy rains. Most of this water was accumulated between 38 and 14 thousand years ago, although some reservoirs formed relatively recently - around 5000 BC. When the planet's climate changed dramatically three thousand years ago, the Sahara became a desert, but the water that had seeped into the ground over thousands of years had already accumulated in underground horizons.

After the discovery of huge reserves of fresh water, projects for the construction of an irrigation system immediately appeared. However, the idea was realized much later and only thanks to the Government of Muammar Gaddafi. The project involved the creation of a water pipeline to deliver water from underground reservoirs from the south to the north of the country, to the industrial and more populated part of Libya. In October 1983, Project Management was created and funding began. The total cost of the project at the start of construction was estimated at $25 billion, and the planned implementation period was at least 25 years. Construction was divided into five phases: the first - the construction of a pipe plant and a 1,200-kilometer-long pipeline with a daily supply of two million cubic meters of water to Benghazi and Sirte; the second is to bring pipelines to Tripoli and provide it with daily supplies of one million cubic meters of water; third - completion of the construction of a water pipeline from the Kufra oasis to Benghazi; the last two are the construction of the western branch to the city of Tobruk and the unification of the branches into a single system near the city of Sirte.

The fields created by the Great Man-Made River are clearly visible from space: in satellite images they appear as bright green circles scattered among grey-yellow desert areas.

Direct construction work began in 1984 - on August 28, Muammar Gaddafi laid the first stone of the project. The cost of the first phase of the project was estimated at $5 billion. The construction of a unique, world's first plant for the production of giant pipes in Libya was carried out by South Korean specialists using modern technologies. Specialists from the world's leading companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany came to the country. The latest equipment was purchased. To lay concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. Migrant labor from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam was used as the main unskilled labor force.

In 1989, water entered the Ajdabiya and Grand Omar Muktar reservoirs, and in 1991 - into the Al-Ghardabiya reservoir. The first and largest stage was officially opened in August 1991 - water supply began to such large cities as Sirte and Benghazi. Already in August 1996, regular water supply was established in the capital of Libya, Tripoli.

As a result, the Libyan government spent $33 billion on the creation of the eighth wonder of the world, and the financing was carried out without international loans or IMF support. Recognizing the right to water supply as a fundamental human right, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water. The government also tried not to purchase anything for the project in the “first world” countries, but to produce everything necessary within the country. All materials used for the project were locally produced, and the plant, built in the city of Al-Buraika, produced more than half a million pipes with a diameter of four meters from prestressed reinforced concrete.

Before the construction of the water pipeline began, 96% of Libya's territory was desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life. After the project was fully completed, it was planned to supply water and cultivate 155 thousand hectares of land. By 2011, it was possible to establish supplies of 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water to the cities of Libya, providing it to 4.5 million people. At the same time, 70% of the water produced by Libya was consumed in the agricultural sector, 28% by the population, and the rest by industry. But the government’s goal was not only to fully provide the population with fresh water, but also to reduce Libya’s dependence on imported food, and in the future, the country’s entry into completely its own food production. With the development of water supply, large agricultural farms were built to produce wheat, oats, corn and barley, which had previously only been imported. Thanks to watering machines connected to the irrigation system, circles of man-made oases and fields with a diameter ranging from several hundred meters to three kilometers have grown in the arid regions of the country.

Measures were also taken to encourage Libyans to move to the south of the country, to the farms created in the desert. However, not all of the local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal areas. Therefore, the country's government turned to Egyptian peasants with an invitation to come to Libya to work. After all, the population of Libya is only 6 million people, while in Egypt there are more than 80 million, living mainly along the Nile. The water pipeline also made it possible to organize resting places for people and animals with water trenches (aryks) brought to the surface on the routes of camel caravans in the Sahara. Libya has even begun supplying water to neighboring Egypt.

Compared to Soviet irrigation projects implemented in Central Asia to irrigate cotton fields, the man-made river project had a number of fundamental differences. Firstly, to irrigate Libyan agricultural land, a huge underground source was used, rather than a surface and relatively small, compared to the volumes taken. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral environmental disaster. Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were eliminated, since delivery took place in a closed way, which eliminated evaporation. Devoid of these shortcomings, the created water supply system became an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.

When Gaddafi first started his project, he became the target of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the derogatory stamp “dream in a pipe” appeared in the media of the States and Britain. But 20 years later, in one of the rare materials dedicated to the success of the project, National Geographic magazine recognized it as “epoch-making.” By this time, engineers from all over the world were coming to the country to gain Libyan experience in hydraulic engineering. Since 1990, UNESCO has provided assistance in supporting and training engineers and technicians. Gaddafi described the water project as “the strongest answer to America, which accuses Libya of supporting terrorism, saying that we are not capable of anything else.”

In 1999, the Great Man-Made River was awarded by UNESCO International Prize Water is an award that recognizes outstanding research work on water use in drylands.

It's not beer that kills people...

On September 1, 2010, speaking at the opening ceremony of the next section of the artificial water river, Muammar Gaddafi said: “After this achievement of the Libyan people, the US threat against Libya will double. The USA will try to do everything under any other pretext, but the real reason will stop this achievement in order to leave the people of Libya oppressed." Gaddafi turned out to be a prophet: as a result of the speech provoked a few months after this civil war and foreign intervention, the leader of Libya was overthrown and killed without trial. In addition, as a result of the unrest in 2011, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, one of the few leaders who supported Gaddafi’s project, was removed from office.

By the beginning of the war in 2011, three stages of the Great Man-Made River had already been completed. Construction of the last two stages was scheduled to continue over the next 20 years. However, NATO bombing caused significant damage to the water supply system and destroyed the pipe production plant for its construction and repair. Many foreign citizens who worked on the project in Libya for decades have left the country. Because of the war, the water supply for 70% of the population was disrupted, and the irrigation system was damaged. And the bombing of power supply systems by NATO planes deprived water supply even to those regions where the pipes remained untouched.

Of course, we cannot say that the real reason the murder of Gaddafi was precisely his water project, but the Libyan leader’s fears were well founded: today water is emerging as the planet’s main strategic resource.

Unlike the same oil, water is a necessary and primary condition of life. The average person can live without water for no more than 5 days. According to the UN, by the beginning of the 2000s, more than 1.2 billion people lived in conditions of constant fresh water shortage, and about 2 billion suffered from it regularly. By 2025, the number of people living with chronic water shortages will exceed 3 billion. According to 2007 data from the United Nations Development Program, global water consumption doubles every 20 years, more than twice as fast as human population growth. At the same time, every year there are more and more large deserts around the world, and the amount of usable agricultural land in most areas is less and less, while rivers, lakes and large underground aquifers around the world are losing their flow. At the same time, the cost of a liter of high-quality bottled water on the world market can reach several euros, which significantly exceeds the cost of a liter of 98 gasoline and, even more so, the price of a liter of crude oil. According to some estimates, the revenues of freshwater companies will soon exceed those of oil companies. And a number of analytical reports on the fresh water market indicate that today more than 600 million people (9% of the world's population) receive water from a dosimeter of private providers and at market prices.

Available fresh water resources have long been in the sphere of interests of transnational corporations. At the same time, the World Bank strongly supports the idea of ​​privatizing fresh water sources, while at the same time doing its best to slow down water projects that dry countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, over the past 20 years, the World Bank and the IMF have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt, and blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile in South Sudan.

Against this background, the resources of the Nubian aquifer are of enormous commercial interest to large foreign corporations, and the Libyan project does not seem to fit into the general scheme of private development of water resources. Look at these numbers: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the Earth's rivers and lakes, are estimated at 200 thousand cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and all five Great Lakes contain 22.7 thousand. The reserves of the Nubian reservoir are 150 thousand cubic kilometers, that is, they are only 25% less than all the water contained in rivers and lakes. At the same time, we must not forget that most of the planet’s rivers and lakes are heavily polluted. Scientists estimate the reserves of the Nubian Aquifer to be equivalent to two hundred years of flow of the Nile River. If we take the largest underground reserves found in sedimentary rocks under Libya, Algeria and Chad, then they will be enough to cover all these territories with 75 meters of water. It is estimated that these reserves will be enough for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.

Before the water pipeline was put into operation, the cost of desalted seawater purchased by Libya was $3.75 per ton. The construction of its own water supply system allowed Libya to completely abandon imports. At the same time, the sum of all costs for the extraction and transportation of 1 cubic meter of water cost the Libyan state (before the war) 35 American cents, which is 11 times less than before. This was already comparable to the cost of cold tap water in Russian cities. For comparison: the cost of water in European countries is approximately 2 euros.

In this sense, the value of Libyan water reserves turns out to be much higher than the value of the reserves of all its oil fields. Thus, the proven oil reserves in Libya - 5.1 billion tons - at the current price of $400 per ton will amount to about $2 trillion. Compare them with the cost of water: even based on the minimum 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves amount to 10-15 trillion dollars (with a total cost of water in the Nubian layer of 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times greater than all Libyan oil reserves . If we start exporting this water in bottled form, the amount will increase many times over.

Therefore, the assertions that the military operation in Libya was nothing more than a “war for water” have quite obvious grounds.

Risks

In addition to the political risks outlined above, the Great Artificial River had at least two more. It was the first major project of its kind, so no one could predict with any certainty what would happen when the aquifers began to deplete. Concerns were expressed that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would lead to large-scale ground failures in the territories of several African countries. On the other hand, it was unclear what would happen to the existing natural oases, since many of them were originally fed by underground aquifers. Today, at least the drying up of one of the natural lakes in the Libyan oasis of Kufra is associated precisely with overexploitation of aquifers.

But be that as it may, at the moment the artificial Libyan river is one of the most complex, most expensive and largest engineering projects implemented by mankind, but grew out of the dream of one single person “to make the desert green, like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya.”

The Great Man-Made River in Libya is the largest engineering and construction project of our time, thanks to which the country's residents gained access to drinking water and were able to settle in areas where no one had ever lived before. Currently, 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water flow through underground water pipelines every day, which is also used for the development of agriculture in the region. Read on to see how the construction of this grandiose facility took place.

The eighth wonder of the world

The total length of underground communications of the artificial river is close to four thousand kilometers. The volume of soil excavated and transferred during construction - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the building materials spent would be enough to build 16 Cheops pyramids. In addition to pipes and aqueducts, the system includes over 1,300 wells, most of which are more than 500 meters deep. The total depth of the wells is 70 times the height of Everest.

The main branches of the water pipeline consist of concrete pipes 7.5 meters long, 4 meters in diameter and weighing more than 80 tons (up to 83 tons). And each of over 530 thousand of these pipes could easily serve as a tunnel for subway trains.
From the main pipes, water flows into reservoirs built near cities with a volume of 4 to 24 million cubic meters, and from them the local water supply systems of cities and towns begin.
Fresh water enters the water supply system from underground sources located in the south of the country and feeds settlements concentrated mainly off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, including the largest cities of Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. The water is drawn from the Nubian Aquifer, which is the largest known source of fossil fresh water in the world.
The Nubian Aquifer is located in the eastern Sahara Desert over an area of ​​more than two million square kilometers and contains 11 large underground reservoirs. The territory of Libya is located above four of them.
In addition to Libya, several other African states are located on the Nubian layer, including northwestern Sudan, northeastern Chad and most of Egypt.

The Nubian aquifer was discovered in 1953 by British geologists while searching for oil fields. The fresh water in it is hidden under a layer of hard ferruginous sandstone from 100 to 500 meters thick and, as scientists have established, accumulated underground during the period when fertile savannas stretched in place of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent heavy rains.
Most of this water was accumulated between 38 and 14 thousand years ago, although some reservoirs formed relatively recently - around 5000 BC. When the planet's climate changed dramatically three thousand years ago, the Sahara became a desert, but the water that had seeped into the ground over thousands of years had already accumulated in underground horizons.

After the discovery of huge reserves of fresh water, projects for the construction of an irrigation system immediately appeared. However, the idea was realized much later and only thanks to the Government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The project involved the creation of a water pipeline to deliver water from underground reservoirs from the south to the north of the country, to the industrial and more populated part of Libya. In October 1983, Project Management was created and funding began. The total cost of the project at the start of construction was estimated at $25 billion, and the planned implementation period was at least 25 years.
Construction was divided into five phases: the first - the construction of a pipe plant and a 1,200-kilometer-long pipeline with a daily supply of two million cubic meters of water to Benghazi and Sirte; the second is to bring pipelines to Tripoli and provide it with daily supplies of one million cubic meters of water; third - completion of the construction of a water pipeline from the Kufra oasis to Benghazi; the last two are the construction of the western branch to the city of Tobruk and the unification of the branches into a single system near the city of Sirte.

The fields created by the Great Man-Made River are clearly visible from space: in satellite images they appear as bright green circles scattered among grey-yellow desert areas. In the photo: cultivated fields near the Kufra oasis.
Direct construction work began in 1984 - on August 28, Muammar Gaddafi laid the first stone of the project. The cost of the first phase of the project was estimated at $5 billion. The construction of a unique, world's first plant for the production of giant pipes in Libya was carried out by South Korean specialists using modern technologies.
Specialists from the world's leading companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany came to the country. The latest equipment was purchased. To lay concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. Migrant labor from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam was used as the main unskilled labor force.

In 1989, water entered the Ajdabiya and Grand Omar Muktar reservoirs, and in 1991 - into the Al-Ghardabiya reservoir. The first and largest stage was officially opened in August 1991 - water supply began to such large cities as Sirte and Benghazi. Already in August 1996, regular water supply was established in the capital of Libya, Tripoli.

As a result, the Libyan government spent $33 billion on the creation of the eighth wonder of the world, and the financing was carried out without international loans or IMF support. Recognizing the right to water supply as a fundamental human right, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water.
The government also tried not to purchase anything for the project in the “first world” countries, but to produce everything necessary within the country. All materials used for the project were locally produced, and the plant, built in the city of Al-Buraika, produced more than half a million pipes with a diameter of four meters from prestressed reinforced concrete.

Before the construction of the water pipeline began, 96% of Libya's territory was desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life.
After the project was fully completed, it was planned to supply water and cultivate 155 thousand hectares of land.
By 2011, it was possible to establish supplies of 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water to the cities of Libya, providing it to 4.5 million people. At the same time, 70% of the water produced by Libya was consumed in the agricultural sector, 28% by the population, and the rest by industry.
But the government’s goal was not only to fully provide the population with fresh water, but also to reduce Libya’s dependence on imported food, and in the future, the country’s entry into completely its own food production.
With the development of water supply, large agricultural farms were built to produce wheat, oats, corn and barley, which had previously only been imported. Thanks to watering machines connected to the irrigation system, circles of man-made oases and fields with a diameter ranging from several hundred meters to three kilometers have grown in the arid regions of the country.

Measures were also taken to encourage Libyans to move to the south of the country, to the farms created in the desert. However, not all of the local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal areas.
Therefore, the country's government turned to Egyptian peasants with an invitation to come to Libya to work. After all, the population of Libya is only 6 million people, while in Egypt there are more than 80 million, living mainly along the Nile. The water pipeline also made it possible to organize resting places for people and animals with water trenches (aryks) brought to the surface on the routes of camel caravans in the Sahara.
Libya has even begun supplying water to neighboring Egypt.

Compared to Soviet irrigation projects implemented in Central Asia to irrigate cotton fields, the man-made river project had a number of fundamental differences.
Firstly, to irrigate Libyan agricultural land, a huge underground source was used, rather than a surface and relatively small, compared to the volumes taken. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral environmental disaster.
Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were eliminated, since delivery took place in a closed way, which eliminated evaporation. Devoid of these shortcomings, the created water supply system became an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.
When Gaddafi first started his project, he became the target of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the derogatory stamp “dream in a pipe” appeared in the media of the States and Britain.
But 20 years later, in one of the rare materials dedicated to the success of the project, National Geographic magazine recognized it as “epoch-making.” By this time, engineers from all over the world were coming to the country to gain Libyan experience in hydraulic engineering.
Since 1990, UNESCO has provided assistance in supporting and training engineers and technicians. Gaddafi described the water project as “the strongest answer to America, which accuses Libya of supporting terrorism, saying that we are not capable of anything else.”

Available fresh water resources have long been in the sphere of interests of transnational corporations. At the same time, the World Bank strongly supports the idea of ​​privatizing fresh water sources, while at the same time doing its best to slow down water projects that dry countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, over the past 20 years, the World Bank and the IMF have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt, and blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile in South Sudan.
Against this background, the resources of the Nubian aquifer are of enormous commercial interest to large foreign corporations, and the Libyan project does not seem to fit into the general scheme of private development of water resources.
Look at these numbers: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the Earth's rivers and lakes, are estimated at 200 thousand cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and all five Great Lakes contain 22.7 thousand. The reserves of the Nubian reservoir are 150 thousand cubic kilometers, that is, they are only 25% less than all the water contained in rivers and lakes.
At the same time, we must not forget that most of the planet’s rivers and lakes are heavily polluted. Scientists estimate the reserves of the Nubian Aquifer to be equivalent to two hundred years of flow of the Nile River. If we take the largest underground reserves found in sedimentary rocks under Libya, Algeria and Chad, then they will be enough to cover all these territories with 75 meters of water.
It is estimated that these reserves will be enough for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.

Before the water pipeline was put into operation, the cost of desalted seawater purchased by Libya was $3.75 per ton. The construction of its own water supply system allowed Libya to completely abandon imports.
At the same time, the sum of all costs for the extraction and transportation of 1 cubic meter of water cost the Libyan state (before the war) 35 American cents, which is 11 times less than before. This was already comparable to the cost of cold tap water in Russian cities. For comparison: the cost of water in European countries is approximately 2 euros.
In this sense, the value of Libyan water reserves turns out to be much higher than the value of the reserves of all its oil fields. Thus, the proven oil reserves in Libya - 5.1 billion tons - at the current price of $400 per ton will amount to about $2 trillion.
Compare them with the cost of water: even based on the minimum 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves amount to 10-15 trillion dollars (with a total cost of water in the Nubian layer of 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times greater than all Libyan oil reserves . If we start exporting this water in bottled form, the amount will increase many times over.
Therefore, the assertions that the military operation in Libya was nothing more than a “war for water” have quite obvious grounds.

In addition to the political risks outlined above, the Great Artificial River had at least two more. It was the first major project of its kind, so no one could predict with any certainty what would happen when the aquifers began to deplete. Concerns were expressed that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would lead to large-scale ground failures in the territories of several African countries. On the other hand, it was unclear what would happen to the existing natural oases, since many of them were originally fed by underground aquifers. Today, at least the drying up of one of the natural lakes in the Libyan oasis of Kufra is associated precisely with overexploitation of aquifers.
But be that as it may, at the moment the artificial Libyan river is one of the most complex, most expensive and largest engineering projects implemented by mankind, but grew out of the dream of one single person “to make the desert green, like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya.”
Modern satellite images show that after the bloody American-European aggression, the round fields in Libya are now quickly turning into desert again...