![]() Red corresponds to an elevation of 400 meters above the basin floor. At other times (right) less water would have flown into the low-lying basin from the Nile (visible on the right in both images), causing the lake to shrink. Image: At perhaps its greatest extent, the Tushka lake would have covered more than 68,000 square kilometers (shown in false color topographical image at left). The ancient lakes, says Maxwell, suggest that such flooding was already under way, at least to some degree, a quarter million years ago. Today, for water, Egyptians rely almost exclusively on the Nile and its annual floods. Breathtaking pictures that include the deepest-ever infrared view of ancient galaxies offer a preview of the spectacular science in store for the most powerful space observatory in history. Pakal is seen as a Maize God falling into the open mouth of death, an image conflated with the glyph for a Black Hole. He sits on a chair, his foot on a pedal, his hands manipulating the controls, and his nose is a breathing apparatus. ![]() Deprived of water since 2003, these lakes have since almost entirely dried out, says Abdelsalam. Ancient Astronaut Theory speaks of this depiction on Pakals sarcophagus lid as preparing for space flight. A series of five small “new lakes of the Sahara” was born. Just northeast of where the huge paleolake once lay, the Nile also overflowed, starting in 1998. Something similar is going on today at a smaller scale, says Mohamed Abdelsalam, a geologist at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla. “This lake was going up and going down in size, doing all kinds of things over multiple thousands of years,” he says. Heavy rain in highlands to the south, from where the Nile flows, would have caused the lake to grow dry spells shrank it. At its maximum, this ancient lake would have stretched for 350 kilometers, down to the modern-day Sudan border.Īt the time, the Tushka area had more rainfall than today and would have been covered by grasslands, says Maxwell. In Egypt, west of the Nile Valley in a region known as Tushka, the researchers spotted a low-lying area where water would have pooled after overflowing from the river, carrying fish with it. Maxwell and his colleagues recently analyzed those pictures to deduce how water would have drained across northeastern Africa over the past few hundred thousand years, ever since the Nile was born. In 2000, astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour used a radar instrument to take high-resolution pictures of the area’s topography. That discovery, says Maxwell, triggered scientists to think about how those fish could have gotten there. The new study targeted Egypt, some 400 kilometers west of the Nile, where in the 1980s researchers reporting finding fish fossils in the desert. Other studies have found evidence of mega-lakes in Chad, Libya and Sudan at various points over the past 250,000 years. But during next summer’s field season, she and her colleagues will be checking for ancient shorelines at the elevations suggested in the new paper. Since then, desert winds have eroded and sands have buried much of the region’s landscape, says Maxine Kleindienst, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto.
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