Water wizard

He once prepared astronauts for moon missions. Now Dr Farouk Al Baz is more focused on Earth. The acclaimed geologist searches for underground water sources and his latest discovery - water deep beneath Darfur in Sudan could help bring peace to the troubled region.

Sudan's Darfur region is a harsh, arid landscape, a place where nearly 200,000 people have died since 2003 and millions have been displaced.

It is a conflict that is now spilling into Chad and the Central African Republic as farmers and militia continue to battle for land. Drought and desertification have worsened the situation. Darfur is as thirsty for peace as it is for water.

Yet one scientist's incredible discovery could bring peace to this fractured land. Using radar data, Dr Farouk Al Baz has discovered an ancient lake as large as the state of Massachusetts under the blood-soaked sands of Darfur.

Although it may seem like science fiction now, some 5,000 to 11,000 years ago, Darfur was a lush place with lakes, rivers and a humid climate. As the region's geology changed, most of the lake's water subsequently seeped through the sandstone substrate to accumulate as groundwater.

The lake beneath Darfur lies 573 metres above sea level. It occupies an area of 30,750 sq km and may have contained some 2,530 cubic km of water when it was full in the past.

Riding on the back of Dr Al Baz's findings, some 1,000 wells will be drilled in Darfur to look for this water as part of a UN-supported humanitarian initiative.

"Access to fresh water is essential for refugee survival. It will help the peace process and provide the necessary resources for the much needed economic development in Darfur," says Dr Al Baz.

At 69, the soft-spoken, grey-haired Egyptian-American is both scientist and savant. His love of humanity and desire to use his knowledge to improve people's lives would make any do-gooder proud.

After a meeting with Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, Dr Al Baz helped launch the 1,000 Wells for Darfur humanitarian initiative.

The plan aims to tap into groundwater resources to help establish peace and economic security in the region. The UN Mission in Sudan also plans to drill several wells for its peacekeeping forces.

This modern-day water diviner, who uses satellite images instead of a forked twig, has previously unearthed water in other parts of the Sahara.

In the early 1980s, he discovered underground water in the East Uweint Basin in southwestern Egypt. That led to 500 new wells being bored in the region, irrigating up to 150,000 acres of farmland, just northeast of Darfur.

He will be applying his knowledge to the UAE's deserts too. Needless to say, Dr Al Baz is a hero in his native Egypt.A veteran of Nasa's Apollo programme, the iconic TV series Star Trek honoured his achievements by naming a shuttle after him in an episode.

In Episode 10 ('Galileo Was Right') of the TV series From the Earth to the Moon, produced by Tom Hanks, his role in the training of the Apollo astronauts was featured in a segment entitled 'The Brain of Farouk Al Baz'.

One of his most fascinating finds is the largest crater in the Great Sahara of North Africa, which was formed by a meteorite tens of millions of years ago.

He made the discovery while studying satellite images of the Western Desert of Egypt with his colleague, Dr Eman Ghoneim. The double-ringed crater about 31 km in diameter was named Kebira ('large' in Arabic).

"Kebira may have escaped recognition because it is so large - equivalent to the total expanse of the Cairo urban region from its airport in the northeast to the Pyramids of Giza in the southwest," says Dr Al Baz.

When he is not unearthing underground lakes and meteorite craters, Dr Al Baz is research professor and director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University. He is also adjunct professor of geology at the Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University in Cairo.

The Geological Society of America created the Farouk Al Baz Desert Research Award in 1999 to further understanding of the little-researched places of the earth.

An accomplished author and editor of 12 books, he has contributed more than 200 scientific papers to professional journals and lectured in academic institutions and research centres worldwide.

He has won numerous honours and awards, including Nasa's Apollo Achievement Award, Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and Special Recognition Award and the Arab Republic of Egypt Order of Merit - First Class.

He is also the president of the Arab Society for Desert Research. He and his American wife, Patricia, have four daughters: Monira (Mika), Soraya, Karima, and Fairouz. They also have four grandchildren. He has been a citizen of the US since 1970.

I
I consistently try to convey my knowledge to others through public lectures and talks. My work is truly wonderful: to do something for people I don't know and have never met, to do something that will change their lives completely for the better.

One of the most important jobs I've had was helping with the selection of landing sites for the astronauts to land on the moon.

I have never taken a single course in astronomy. Everything major that has happened in my life has been complete coincidence.

My wife reminded me the other day of how far I have come since I first came to the US in 1969. She remembered the first letters I wrote to her, when I struggled with English. But I was driven, otherwise I would not have been able to make a difference and other people wouldn't have been able to see my point.

ME

Me and my childhood:
I was born on January 1, 1938 in the Nile Delta town of Zagazig, but (my family) hails from the village of Toukh Al Aqlam. I loved the fact that every summer we would head for our village and live the farmer's life - sowing and tilling the land, watching crops grow and taking care of livestock.

The relationship that Egyptians have with their land is something that lives with me to this day. As does their relationship with the Nile - with both the water, and the technology used to lift water and feed it to the fields.

From the age of 3 to 12, we lived in a town called Damiyatta on the Egyptian coast near the Nile Delta. While there, I spent a lot of time observing the river and the sea. Every summer the river would flood, bringing vigorous brown floodwater into the town. Then when I was 16, our family moved to Cairo.

In school I joined the Boy Scouts. We visited many places outside Cairo. In the Yellow Mountains, I collected samples of rocks and had my own museum of rocks in a shoebox.

After every Boy Scout expedition, I would take my three younger sisters to the same place. We would have a picnic and I would show them the various rock samples and explain their origins.

In high school I thought I would become a doctor. But my grades were not good enough. So I completed a BSc in chemistry and geology from Ain Shams University, followed by a scholarship for graduate study in the US.

In 1961, I received an MSc degree in geology from the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy; my performance won me membership of the honorary society of Sigma Xi.

Going to the US was a huge culture shock; it was also my first time on a plane! I arrived in Missouri on New Year's Day, the middle of winter, and I couldn't comprehend how people could live there.

It was the first time I had seen snow. I did not speak English and the weather was weird - it rained all summer and snowed in winter. But I got used to it. I pushed myself to learn quicker and work harder than the American kids, so they would respect me.

I wanted to do better so I would have enough confidence to talk to them and build a relationship. That's what drove me.

In 1964, I received a PhD in geology from the University of Missouri after conducting research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.

Me and the Apollo space programme:
From 1967 to 1972, I participated in the Apollo programme as the supervisor of lunar science planning at Bellcomm Inc, a division of AT&T that conducted systems analysis for Nasa Headquarters in Washington DC.

I had no idea what the moon was made of ... I knew nothing. Maybe that was a good thing, because it made me dig deep and learn better. When I arrived, there was a bunch of geologists who had been working for six years on moon samples. To be able to converse with them, I had to know as much as them. There wasn't a moment to waste.

Within six months I had caught up. My colleagues recommended me for the positions of secretary of the Landing Site Selection Committee for the Apollo missions to the moon, principal investigator of Visual Observations and Photography and chairman of the Astronaut Training Group.

They said I knew how to fix things and talk to the engineers.

The astronauts nicknamed me 'The King'. When I joined the programme, they had been learning geology for six years - they hated it and did not want to talk to any geologist. They were being taught geology the way I had been taught ... the names of rocks and the chemical formulae, etc.

Little wonder they didn't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole! The selection of landing sites on the moon depended on geological interpretation of photographs taken of the moon.

So they had to learn to interpret the terrain from pictures, especially places they had never been to before. I befriended one of the astronauts, Ken Nightingley. I took some pictures of the moon and circled the areas they would be flying over. I did not breathe a word of geology.

I introduced the craters and we stuck with the names he came up with: The Snowman, The Doublet and so on. At the end of two hours he asked me when I would come by again. The astronauts began to love geology.

My idea was that if the astronauts went to the moon with no idea of what they were looking at, then we wouldn't get much out of them.

Even a machine can go and pick up samples, but there are things the human eye and mind can do which the machine cannot. My contribution was to get the astronauts ... to believe they were doing what only man can do.

So much so that while circling the moon for the first time during Apollo mission 15, astronaut Alfred Worden said, "After The King's training, I feel like I've been here before."

After the Apollo programme ended in 1972, I joined the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to establish and direct the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

At the same time, I was elected as a member of the Lunar Nomenclature Task Group of the International Astronomical Union. In this capacity, I still participate in naming features of the moon as revealed by lunar photographic missions.

In 1973, Nasa selected me as principal investigator of the Earth Observations and Photography Experiment on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), the first joint American-Soviet space mission of July 1975.

After Apollo ended, I took part in the Apollo Applications programme, in which we applied our knowledge from the space programme to analysis of Earth and Mars.
Emphasis was placed on photographing arid environments, particularly the Great Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula, in addition to other features of earth and its oceans.

Me and studying the desert:
From 1973 to 1982, I was research director at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

During this period, scientific research was conducted in desert environments throughout the world with emphasis on the applications of space data to the understanding of the origin and evolution of arid landforms in space and time.

One of my most significant journeys took place soon after the US and China had normalised relations in 1979, when I coordinated the first visit by US scientists to deserts in northwestern China.

I first studied the Western Desert of Egypt then applied remote sensing to study deserts in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, China and India.

I served as science adviser to the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat from 1978 to 1981. Because of population growth and the attendant food requirements, Sadat believed that Egyptians should not continue to be confined to the Nile Valley and must reclaim more land from the desert.

I was assigned the task of selecting desert tracts to develop, without this being to the detriment of the environment.

In 1986, I joined Boston University as director of the Center for Remote Sensing to promote the use of space technology in the fields of archaeology, geography and geology.

MYSELF

What is the message you would like to give this part of the world?
There's no question we need to improve our knowledge on the layout of our land. We do not understand our land as well as we should. Satellite images provide a wonderful, easy way to do so.

We have the potential to be so much better than what we are if we develop our minds and our abilities to seek knowledge, to understand more and work harder to raise our analytical thinking. We need to contribute to humanity.

What accolade has been most precious to you?
I remember one instance in the Western Desert region of Egypt. There was a tiny oasis settlement whose wells had dried up and the government was to move the people who lived there to another place.

The villagers knew it would be a lousy place with ugly cement houses. Their way of life, as they knew it, was over. One of my colleagues at the Desert Research Institute told me about this and suggested we look at pictures of the area to see if there was potential for drilling wells.

I found some promising sources of groundwater. So my colleague went with a driller, they drilled just one well and it was more than enough for the whole village!

On one of my frequent trips to the region, the villagers heard that we were there. The entire village turned up to thank me. They picked me up and carried me on their shoulders with joy - all these people I had never met before! They had waited for me to arrive in the area so I could inaugurate the main pipeline.

It was just a wonderful moment ... the incredible emotion and goodwill of that day was extraordinarily special.