The Shrinking Toshka Lakes in the Google Earth Images

Author(s): Amelia Carolina Sparavigna

Toshka Lakes are lakes artificially created in the Sahara Desert of Egypt, by the water of the Nile, conveyed from the Nasser Lake through a canal in the Toshka Depression. From space, astronauts noticed the growing of a first lake, the easternmost one, in 1998. Then additional lakes grew in succession due west, the westernmost one between 2000 and 2001. The pictures of the Toshka Lakes taken by the crews of space missions and the satellite imagery can show the evolution of them. From 2006, the lakes started shrinking rapidly. The recent images, among them those of Google Earth, display that the surface of the lakes is strongly reduced and some of them entirely dried out.

Satellite Images, Image processing, Google Earth

1. Toshka Lakes, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshka_Lakes
2. W.S. Wahby, Technologies Applied in the Toshka Project of Egypt, The Journal of Technology Studies, 2004, pages 86-91
3. B. Hope, Egypt's new Nile Valley: grand plan gone bad, The National, Apr 22, 2012
4. The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, at http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/
5. NASA Earth Observatory, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Earth_Observatory
6. Toshka Lakes, December 17, 2000, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=1008
7. G.M. El-Shabrawy and H.J. Dumont, The Toshka Lakes, in, The Nile, Monographiae Biologicae, volume 89, III, 2009, pages 157-162
8. M. El Bastawesy, S. Arafat and F. Khalaf, Estimation of water loss from Toshka Lakes using remote sensing and GIS, 10th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2007, Aalborg University, Denmark, pages 1-9
9. Lake Moeris, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Moeris
10. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by J. Bostock and H.T. Riley, H.G. Bohm Ed., London, 1857
11. A.C. Sparavigna, The decreasing level of Toshka Lakes seen from space, arXiv, 2011, Geophysics, arXiv:1107.4430
12. A.C. Sparavigna, A Study of Moving Sand Dunes by Means of Satellite Images, International Journal of Sciences, volume 2, issue August, 2013, pages 33-42
13. A.C. Sparavigna, Moving dunes on the Google Earth, arXiv, January 2013, Geophysics, arXiv:1301.1290
14. GIMP, http://www.gimp.org/
15. T.A. Maxwell, B, Issawi and C.V. Haynes, Jr., Evidence for Pleistocene lakes in the Tushka region, south Egypt, Geology, volume 38, 2010, pages 1135-1138
16. A. Witze, Space Shuttle Images reveal ancient Egyptian lake bed, Wired, 12 January, 2010