250 miles (400 km) above Earth, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) looked out at our planet last May and saw a heart-shaped oasis bloom in the Egyptian desert. And on February 14, the stunning image was shared in memory of Valentine’s Day for the entire planet, courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory website. Known as the Faiyum Oasis, this lush heart of the desert is actually a vast basin of wetlands that stretches over an area of more than 450 square miles (1,200 square kilometers). The oasis has preserved human life for nearly 8,000 years, according to NASA, and has been the starting point for some of the most ambitious engineering feats in ancient history. Fed by a natural channel of the nearby Nile known as Bahr Yusef, the oasis was once a sparkling lake called Lake Moeris. The lake’s existence depended on seasonal flooding from the Nile, according to the Department of Geography at University College London (UCL). When the flood waters of the Nile were very low, the rulers of ancient Egypt sometimes took bold measures. There is evidence that a series of pharaohs who lived about 4,000 years ago addressed the water shortage in particular by expanding Bahr Yusef to manually return water to the area. According to the UCL website, “This was one of the oldest mega national hydrological projects in the world. The responsible Twelfth Dynasty kings were Amenemhat I and III and earned the title of ‘Kings of Engineering’.” Thanks to those ancient works of engineering, the rest of Moeris’ sprawling lakes remains a lush oasis supporting the many villages, towns, farms and orchards – which you (and the astronauts) can see in the unfinished gray areas that make up the heart of the picture.
bright of Hope
Where does the light of hope shine in human life? Where does this magic that transforms human despair into wishes,...