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The discovery of a massive ancient lake in Darfur could help explain how the world’s biggest groundwater reservoir came to be under one of the driest parts of the planet. It is also indisputable evidence that the Sahara was once a wet, green region, researchers claim. Eman Ghoneim at the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing in Massachusetts, US, was using satellite imagery to study the ancient hydrology of north-western Sudan when she noticed a dark, 250-kilometre-long segment on the radar images.

Space Data Unveils Evidence of Ancient Mega-lake in Northern Darfur Researchers at the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing used recently acquired topographic data from satellites to reveal a now dry, ancient mega-lake in the Darfur province of northwestern Sudan. Drs. Eman Ghoneim and Farouk El-Baz made the finding while investigating Landsat images and Radarsat data. Radar waves are able to penetrate the fine-grained sand cover in the hot and dry eastern Sahara to reveal buried features. Segments of the lake’s shoreline were identified at the constant altitude of 573 ± 3 meters above sea level. Ghoneim incorporated these segments...