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| November 27, 2010 | Radar images from space shuttle reveal Egypt 's lost great lake | |
Washington:Geologists have found that a huge lake waxed and
waned deep in the sandy heart of the Egyptian Sahara. Tushka region of Egypt is covered by a huge sand sheet today, but years ago, it was home to a lake as big
as one of the Great Lakes, said T. Maxwell, a geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Radar images taken from the space shuttle
have confirmed that a lake broader than Lake Erie once sprawled a few hundred
kilometers west of the Nile , reports Science News. Knowing where and when such
oases existed could help archaeologists understand the environment Homo sapiens
travelled while migrating out of Africa for the first time, said team leader Maxwell.
"You realize that hey, this place was full of really large lakes when people were
wandering into the rest of the world," he said. At perhaps its greatest extent,
the Tushka Lake would have covered more than 68,000 square kilometres. At other
times less water would have flown into the low-lying basin from the Nile . Since
then, desert winds have eroded and sands have buried much of the region's landscape,
said Maxine Kleindienst, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto . Other
studies have found evidence of mega-lakes in Chad , Libya and Sudan at various
points over the past 250,000 years. The findings were reported in the journal
Geology.
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