Gaddafi’s Great Artificial River
The Great Man-Made River in Libya is a project inaugurated by Gaddafi in 1991, aimed at pumping non-renewable aquifers from the Nubian Sandstone Basin to populated areas in the north. The project’s origin lies in the discovery of the world’s largest groundwater reservoir during an oil exploration drilling in 1953.
The pipeline system extends over 4,000 kilometers, supported by nearly 1,300 wells and reservoirs. It can transport up to 6.5 million cubic meters of water per day. A significant portion of the infrastructure was bombed by the coalition in 2011.
