Agreed - Looking forward to a B1M episode about it. I found this tweet thread [1] which has a lot of interesting information. Some maps make it appear to be connected to the Nile, while this poster continues to say it transfers "wastewater from Alexandria to western desert". Quite cool if it's all wastewater, but I suspect it must be a combination of Nile water and wastewater.
The California aqueduct (444 miles, 714km) would like to have a word :-).
Basically built for the same reason, the central valley of California was mostly arid but the top soil was good for agriculture. The underground aquifer was a limit on how much farming (and of what type) could be done.
Whilst it could be that the editor or author are technically wrong it’s also quite possible that they might be technically correct and were just arguing semantics here.
As far as geography/geology/hydrology goes rivers have a specific definition which the grand canal might not fit especially as one big system since afaik it extends and connects to multiple rivers and the water doesn’t flow in a single direction into a larger body of water.
I think the distinction the authors are making - correctly or not, I’m not sure, plenty of rivers don’t flow to the sea - is this artificial river flows into the sea, not into other canals or rivers.
The grand canal connects the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, for example.
The issue isn’t direction but rather having multiple branches as a river only includes channel(s) going downstream from a single point. Without that definition a river’s length would be the length of every river connected to it.
Thus the Mississippi and Ohio river are considered different rivers even though their waters mix and both flow downstream through the same channel.
According to this definition then Iraq’s man-made river (Saddam’s river) is longer at 565 km. the official role of the river was to collect irrigation water from Mesopotamia fertile land all the way to the Persian Gulf, though the real reason Saddam built it was to dry the Arab Marshes as it was difficult to contain the rebels in the marshes. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B5%D8%A8...
An aqueduct isn’t a river. While the exact definition may seem vague the use of multiple pumping stations along the Californi aqueduct are one obvious difference.
It's unclear that the river in the article is a river in the conventional sense, either: it seems to be routed underground for long stretches of tunnel at points.
(The longest tunnel in the world is also a water tunnel, and supplies NYC with water[1].)
The Erie Canal (362.9 mi) is not as long as the California aqueduct nor the Grand Canal in China but it is also longer than the "man made river" of the article, and IT HAS A SONG, and a good one at that.
Let's nitpick then. It says: "According to its website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2,820 kilometres (1,750 mi))[3] and aqueducts in the world.".
It could concievably have no pipe longer than 114 km.
Even the Romans (Byzantine if you wish) built the aqueduct of Valens supplying Constantinopole with fresh water over 426km so yeah I'm also not sure what is this so impressive. And anyway, if the Egyptian one stays uncovered as the pictures show it, I wonder how much water will it have left on a hot day (which are almost all) when it approaches destination.
Doesn't California also contain the largest earthen dam or something to that extent? It's not as impressive as the Hoover dam or the Three Gorges dam but it's still huge from what I understand.
> The California aqueduct (444 miles, 714km) would like to have a word :-)
>> How can a country that is barely even 300 years old, have such a bloated ego.What deep rooted insecurity makes it necessary to toot ones horn, long after all neighbors have gone deaf?
I don't know what has caused you to lash out in that manner, but that was unnecessary. OP did not make a claim that the California aqueduct was the longest man-made river, merely that the aqueduct is longer than the Egyptian project, so the latter's claim to the longest man-made river might not be valid.
In fairness to the GP Americans from the US are nominally assholes with their "we're the best" attitude. Although these days I think you would find more and more "we suck" attitudes especially with the hollowing out of the institutions and our inability to do anything about health care or gun related deaths. Historically this sort of animus is directed towards the leading economy (which may be China one of these days). In the past the English, the Dutch, and the French have dealt with this sort of thing.
By and large though for PicassoCTs, the framing of my comment was to poke fun at the editorial decision to call it the longest man made river, I did not, and do not, under appreciate the positive aspects of the project and the industrial and political will Egypt had to muster to create it. You need look no further than high speed rail, which the Egyptians are well on their way to building a network to connect the northern part of the country to the south, and California, a state with an economy literally 10x the size of Egypt's has been unable to pull off.
So no, I harbor no misconceptions about the US being "exceptional", you can rest assured of that.
Im sorry then, i misinterpreted. I guess i should delete this rant, but then mistakes are what makes us human and maybe i accidentally displayed just another sort of hubris :D
Are there any prior examples of rehydrating the desert that have actually worked? (note: from an agricultural perspective, not as artificial oases turned into gambling destinations :-).
The question is in relation to the quality of the soil after millenia of arid conditions. The Nile valley and delta are historically fertile due to seasonal sedimentation, but that too has stopped with the Aswan High Dam [1]
Egypt's previous de-desertification project "Toshka" kinda of worked. It wasn't the massive job creator that it was sold as because most of the farming was very large scale and mechanized. But it was able to produce large amounts of high quality food that Egyptians rarely saw because it was more valuable for export.
> Are there any prior examples of rehydrating the desert that have actually worked?
As others have noted, there are large swaths of productive agriculture land in California that were, and would continue to be, giant deserts without extensive irrigation projects.
This (and the other examples in comments) are somehow comforting, in the sense that they seem to suggest that soil processes are fairly reversible (though the effort required for achieving results in a reasonable timescale might be enormous).
While I won't check my facts, it feels likely the publication is to blame on this one. I'm pretty sure the Egyptians are not referring to it as anything in English. Meanwhile, how can a writer resist playing on "the world's largest river in Egypt"? (Okay, perhaps they should have resisted harder.)
I guess if they would have called it 'world's largest canal', it would have been more obvious that the title is not true.
That honor goes to the Grand Canal in China, with a length of 1776km.
No I don't think there's a reason. Possibly that the primary sense of a canal is to transport things and this is to transport water. But that's the other sense of the word. I blame it on the firing of copy editors. Maybe this is another thing chatgpt can save us from.
Are you sure you're talking about the same project? That contradicts the maps others have posted in this thread [1], and would also be way longer than 114km to reach the New Delta.
> The New Delta project is the future of Egypt. It will be implemented in two years,” Sisi said in statements during his visit to the Suez Canal Authority’s Maritime Training and Simulation Center in the canal city of Ismailia
There's a LOT that Egypt does wrong that I don't want to replicate in the US. But the US could never get a project of this scale through environmental review anymore, much less in less than 20 years. Really quite disappointing seeing incompetent autocracies outperforming us at building anything larger than a semiconductor.
Here's my favorite example: Plans for the Empire State Building announced August 29, 1929. Construction began on March 17, 1930. The building formally opened on May 1, 1931.
No computer aided drafting, no project management software. Oh, and the stock market crashed shortly after the building was announced.
The Empire State Building had more than double the worker deaths than One World Trade. One World Trade was lambasted as being horrendous on its safety record for a modern building.
I don’t know much about this topic but having it without comparing worker safety seems like we aren’t isolating the variables well.
To me the Empire State Building is a great example of how modern risk management introduces significant risk to a project. IMO the time taken to complete a project is frequently the most critical risk factor. The lack of computerisation and bureaucracy meant that the focus was on how to build it rather than on how to “manage” it.
But I don’t understand the problem with NEPA. Can someone explain? Protecting the environment seems, on its face, to be a good thing.
Kinda neat that a country that’s a successor to an ancient hydraulic empire continues to carry on that civilization’s legacy of massive hydrological projects. Also see the Aswan Dam.
1. A map would be nice.
2. Where is the water coming from, and how is it ensured that this water source is sustainable?
3. A general overview of Egypt's "New Delta" project, and how this is central to its goals.