USA: IMAGES FROM SPACE SHOW ANCIENT RIVER CHANNEL IN SAHARA DESERT

(7 Dec 1996) English/Nat

One of the great mysteries of the Nile River may soon be solved with the discovery of an ancient river channel buried under layers of sand in the Sahara Desert.

The key to uncovering the ancient mystery comes from space age technology.

It is all possible to the latest achievements of the Shuttle Columbia and its crew.

Images taken by the Spaceborn Imaging Radar C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar show how the buried channel under the African desert.

The radar images were developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Texas at Dallas.

One of the things the images help examine is the origin of what's called the Great Bend of the Nile.

The Nile generally flows due north, but in Sudan, it makes a huge, looping bend flowing through the Sahara, the largest, driest desert on the face of the Earth.

There must be a good reason for the Nile to make this turn instead of moving more directly towards the Mediterranean.

SOUNDBITE: (English):
"What we were able to work out of the relationships of the channel that the radar revealed and the course of the Nile was that the Nile has recently, and we don't know how recently, but we suspect is on the order of 10 thousand to 100 thousand years, something in that range, that the Nile has recently been forced to leave its bed and take up a new course to the South. This is a very nice clue about how the region has been active, what we call techtonically active and how the river has been forced to accommodate itself to those changes."
SUPER CAPTION: Dr. Bob Stern, University of Texas at Dallas

The scientific paper on the discovery written by Dr. Stern and co-authored with geologist Dr.Mohamed Gamal Abdelsalam appears in the December 6th issue of "Science Magazine".

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