Great Man Made River - Biggest Canal Project In The World

The construction of the great man-made river in Libya has changed the way people lived in that country in various ways. Libya happens to be a country full of deserts meaning that freshwater will always be one of their main problems to cater.

Great Man-Made River(GMR) is a network of pipelines and broad groundwater channels that was constructed to carry high-quality freshwater from underground far from the Sahara to the beach of Libya.

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It was built for domestic uses, agriculture, and the industries around it. GMR was pictured as the biggest water canal project in the world. Since 1991, this project has supplied fresh water to be supplied to many parts of the cities and even the plantation site in northern Libya.

Previously, the people in that area mostly depended on desalination plants and rainfed aquifers which are very scarce as you reach close to the beach. Libya is one of the countries that received the most daylight in a day on top of being the driest one out there.

Based on data, less than 5% of the regions in that country received enough rainfall for agriculture. In this article, we would share with you how this Great Man-Made River or GMR was built in the Sahara desert.

Libya's Geographic

With an area of around 1.7 million square km, Libya is the 17th biggest country in the world. Situated in North Africa, Libya is home to almost 6.8 million people. The capital city of Libya is Tripoli which is estimated to house around 1.3 million people.

Around 40% of the people lived in three big cities in this country namely Tripoli, Benghazi, and Misrata. Even though the population of Libya has grown steadily recently, the fertility rate is seen to be decreasing as time goes on. 

Arabic is the official language used in Libya whereas Italian and English are considered the second language being used and understood widely in this country. Islam is the main religion practiced in this country and it forms almost 97% of the people's faith.

Libya is a country with the highest oil reserves in Africa making the oil and gas industry thrive in that region. The oil and gas industry contributes up to 80% of the country's annual GDP and comprises 97% of the country's exports.

One of its most important export partners will be Italy.

Construction of the Great Man-Made River

Water was first found in Al-Kufrah in the eastern desert of Libya in the 1950s during the exploration of oil. Further analysis indicates that this discovery is part of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System which is a big water fossil reservoir that aged between 10,000 to 1,000,000 years old.

The water is the ones that have been absorbed in the rock sands when the Sahara regions experienced moderate climates and before the end of the ice age of the Saharan. From the start, the Libyan government plans to establish one of the biggest scale projects for agriculture in the desert where the water was found.

But it seems that the plan changed in the early 1980s and a design was created for the biggest water channel pipes to the beach. Several Libyan officers who were involved in the projects claimed that they have found a big underwater reservoir capable of supplying enough water for the people of Libya for thousands of years.

Yet some also denied the claim stating that it was merely hyperbola since the GMR might not sustain for such a period of time.

GMR 1

Great Man-Made River Authority was established in 1983 by the Libyan government to handle the project and given the contract for the first phase of the construction known as GMR 1 of Phase I. Hundreds of water lakes were grounded from the earth in two plants which are in Tazirbu and Sarir.

In these two plants, water was pumped from a depth of 500 meters. From Sarir, water from both these two plants was pumped underground through twin water pipes to the water reservoir in Ajdabiya which received its first water in 1989.

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From there water was channeled into two pathways which are to the western parts of Surt Beach and due north to Benghazi. The project of Phase I was officially welcomed in Benghazi in 1991.

GMR 1 is capable of carrying 2 million meter cubes of water each day through its 1600 km of twin water pipes from the water plants in the south towards its destination in the north. However, not all of the water is utilized for the country's daily routine.

GMR 2

The second system which is GMR 2 or Phase II is located in western Libya. GMR 2 starts to supply fresh water to the capital city of Libya, Tripoli in 1996. The project extracts water from 3 water wells in Jabal al-Hasawinah. 

From Qasr al-Shuwayrif, one pipe channel pumps water to Tarhunah in the high regions of Nafusah where the water flows by gravity to the Plains of Al-Jifarah. Another pipe channel flows to the northern and eastern parts of the beach where it shifts to the west to supply water to the nearby cities like Misurata and Al-Khums before ending in Tripoli.

The design capacity for the GMR 2 system is 2.5 million cubic meters of water in a day despite only a small amount of that is needed for drinking water.

GMR 3

Being completed in 2009, GMR 3 or Phase III is divided into two parts and adds on to 1,200 km of pipe channels. The first part functions as an expansion of GMR 1 and adds 700km of pipe channels from the new pump station to increase the capacity value of the ready water supply to 3.68 million cubic meters.

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The second part provides another 138,000 cubic meters of water a day to Tobruk from the oasis well of Al-Jaghbub and requires the construction of a reservoir in the southern city and another 500km of pipe channels.

Additional Phase

This project also comprises two new additional phases known as GMR 4 and GMR 5 that include the advanced GMR 1 system towards the south which is to the reservoir well in Al-Kufrah, the pipe channels from the well near Ghadames in the western desert to the beach city of Al-Zawiyah and Zuwarah, western Tripoli and pipe channels that connect GMR 1 and GMR 2 system.

The total capacity value of GMR with all the phases built is roughly 6.5 million cubic meters in a day. The complete network will consist of around 4000km of pipe channels. 250,000 pipes placed in Phase I was said to be the biggest in the world with each of them having a diameter of 4 meters and 7 meters in length.

It was made in two big factories located in Libya, and the pipe is made from a layer of concrete and steel. These parts are then placed in a ditch with a depth of 7 meters using a crane that was specially built and pushed to its place by a bulldozer.

The connections were then sealed with a huge rubber O-bracelet and cement grout while the ditch was also filled. The open reservoir located in the distribution nodes like Ajdabiyah is a man-made lake that was dug out from the ground while being layered with asphalt. 

The construction of this man-made river is without a doubt one of man's greatest achievements in the engineering field. You can just imagine a reservoir with a diameter of more than 1km that can hold as much as 24 million cubic meters of water.

Of course, many engineering companies from across the globe were involved in this project to make it a reality. This GMR project is also one of Libya's pride in building one of the greatest projects in the world.

Source:

• Statista

• Britannica

• Afrik21

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