Satellite image of Sinai Peninsula

Deep beneath the vast sea of sand that blankets the Sinai Peninsula and the surrounding region, three Western Michigan University professors believe a voluminous aquifer that exists there may be a sustainable source of fresh water for the arid region.

Bolstered by more than $750,000 in research dollars from NATO, NSF, NASA, and USAID, Geosciences Professors Mohamed Sultan, Alan Kehew, and William Sauck are mining the desert for water using satellite imaging and other geochemical and geophysical methods to help the burgeoning nations of the Middle East meet demand for fresh water.

A native of Egypt, Sultan is chair of WMU’s Department of Geosciences and heads up the research team. He said growing up in an arid nation spurred his interest in understanding the journey the water makes from the time it rains to the point where it discharges in an oasis in the middle of a desert, or as a stream flowing into a distant water body; in the case of Egypt that would be the River Nile flowing into the Mediterranean Sea. Sultan is referring here to what the hydrologist calls the water cycle, something that intrigued him from a young age.

"Geosciences is a very unique field—a hard-core scientific field that treats the whole world as your lab," Sultan said. "This is very appealing to me and other geoscientists to be in a discipline where you can apply your expertise to various elements of the earth. Hopefully, some of the applications will have use or direct benefits to fellow human beings."

Drawn to the state-of-the-art research equipment, datasets, and expertise available at United States’ research universities, Sultan moved to the states in 1978 and earned his Ph.D. in 1984 from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. in the general area of geochemistry and petrology. As a senior research scientist at the Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing Laboratory at Washington University, he then developed and led the research efforts to bring together remotely sensed observations with others from traditional data sources for a better understanding of the geological problem at hand. He was then lured in 1996 to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago to serve as director of international programs in the environmental research division.

Despite the fact he enjoyed the interdisciplinary research environment that Argonne provided, Sultan missed the interaction with students, and for that reason he then decided to teach at the University at Buffalo Geology Department for two years, from 2002 to 2004. Through his research on the Middle East and the surrounding region, Sultan learned WMU’s Geosciences Department had a long history of research in the area being conducted by Professors Kehew, Sauck, Hampton and Krishnamurthy.

"We all had ongoing projects in Egypt," said Sultan, who joined the department as chair in 2004. "I thought it would be a great complement if we teamed up together and became a focal point in the U.S. in the general area of hydrogeology in Egypt and countries nearby. I believe we are now one of the strongest groups today among U.S. universities conducting research in the general area of hydrogeologic applications in the Middle East, based on the amount of grants we’ve received and graduate student participation."

This group of researchers worked together in WMU's Earth Sciences
Remote Sensing Facility in the Geosciences Department.
Back row l-r: Dr. Khalid Essa (Cairo University), Dr. Ricky Becker
(University of Toledo). Front row l-r: Chris Jones, Dr. Ahmed Al-Dousari
(Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research), Dr. Adam Milewski (WMU)

Over the last two years, 15 visiting research scientists have joined the WMU faculty researchers for short- and long-term campus residencies to complete missions funded by their respective governments. Sultan said more than 50 percent of the Ph.D. candidates for geosciences come from the Middle East, also funded by their governments. The department currently enrolls two doctoral students from Saudi Arabia, one from Iraq and two from Egypt. "We are becoming a focal point on a national and global scale," he said.

Looking for water in arid lands—the projects

A three-year project funded by NATO in collaboration with Dr. Farouk Soliman, Suez Canal University, Ismailia, Egypt, is focused on assessing the groundwater potential of the Sinai Peninsula. Sultan said NATO is interested in funding this project to advance its Environmental Security Program.

The project was launched with the results of a three-year project WMU researchers completed with United Nations Development Program funding, which made it possible for the development of robust cost-effective methodologies for the assessment of groundwater potential over large domains of the Earth’s surface with techniques that rely on readily available remotely acquired data sets. Sultan said these techniques are now applied to locate groundwater in the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula and the Quetta region in Pakistan, vast areas that cover thousands of square kilometers. These technologies could be readily applied to the majority of the world’s arid and semi-arid terrains.

If the fossil waters are indeed replenished from a renewable source, Sultan, Kehew, Sauck and their collaborating researchers plan to figure out the proportion of the water that is renewable, which will enable them to develop extraction scenarios that are sustainable in nature for these reservoirs.

The NASA-funded project utilizes GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite data to measure changes in the gravitational field of the earth as the satellite passes over a particular area on each pass. WMU received about $400,000 from the space agency for the project. The collaborating institutions are the Argonne National Laboratory, Cairo University (Cairo, Egypt), Macquarie University, a WMU exchange partner (Sydney, Australia), and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"We get a new measurement of the gravitational field of our research area every three to four weeks," Sultan said. "The changes hold clues as to the changes in the mass underneath the satellite. We use this data to examine changes in mass that are related to the recharge or discharge of aquifers—water going into or out of—or changes in surface water volumes, such as the water impounded behind dams."

The area the WMU researchers are observing includes Egypt and the Nubian Aquifer, a giant aquifer encompassing large areas in Egypt, Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Sultan said the people of these hyper-arid areas are eager to understand the hydrogeologic systems of this extensive ground water reservoir that they depend on to sustain their rising populations. "With GRACE data, we are now conducting trans-boundary exercises that were not possible earlier that are enhancing our understanding of the Nubian Aquifer reservoir," he said.

The USAID project, which is focused on Pakistan, was also launched from the results the UNDP-funded project. Sultan said Afghanis and Pakistanis seeking refuge from the war zone are moving to the Quetta valley region and are putting extreme pressures on the existing fresh water supplies. USAID awarded WMU $300,000 and the Pakistani Government awarded a similar dollar amount to WMU’s Pakistani collaborators in the University of Balochistan: Dr. Abdul Salam Khan, and Dr. Khalid Mahmood, National Center of Excellence In Mineralogy, University of Balochistan, Quetta, Pakistan.
 

Sultan said funding for these projects is making it possible for WMU researchers to do field work in these remote areas in the Middle East and Far East and for research scientists and junior scientists from overseas institutions to travel to WMU to get trained on state-of-the-art technologies.

Student participation

WMU graduate students are actively involved in the department’s research projects and Sultan has worked with more than a few undergraduates who have entered the field to work with him as graduate students. Two of his former undergraduate students at the University of Buffalo followed him to WMU and have completed Ph.D.’s—Chris Jones, who now works for an environmental company on the east coast, and Adam Mielski, who took Sultan’s 100-level class at Buffalo and is now working for Sultan as a post-doctorate fellow.

A new opportunity for undergraduates to learn more about the region was created this fall, when the WMU Geosciences and Foreign Languages Departments, in collaboration with the Haenicke Institute, developed an innovative 3-credit-hour study abroad program, Civilization and Geology in Egypt , which will be taught by WMU Professors Dr. Robb Gillespie, geosciences, and Dr. Mustafa Mughazy, Arabic language and culture. About 18 students and up to five members of the 20-member Geosciences advisory board, which includes many department alumni, will participate in the inaugural offering of the two-week field trip to Egypt as part of the requirements for the course. Read the story here.

"Robb took advantage of the solid research connections we have with various institutions in Egypt to develop this new course," Sultan said. "Part of the course will be spent visiting tourist sites and tying geology to civilization. There is a reason why the pyramids were built where they are. Students will get a first-hand look at how civilization is tied to climatic and geologic factors."

The group will also visit the Red Sea Hills, where Sultan said they will observe geologic settings and rock types that mimic mountain-building, the formation of continents, and the development of oceans.

"Students will be able to see the rock successions that are indicative of island arc settings such as the ones we seen in the Marianas and Japan today," he said. "Unlike the modern arcs, the ancient island arcs of Egypt are not in their original setting, but were shoved and attached to a much older African continent to the west. Students will see ocean formation processes because the Red Sea is a young sea in the making. They will be able to come to an understanding that if they were there some 20 million years ago they would have been able to walk from Egypt to Saudi Arabia without crossing water. We’ve invited alums from our advisory council to participate and be mentors to our students. They are hard-core geologists, so we’ll have additional experts on the trip to increase one-on-one contact with a geologist for our students."

Read more about the projects on WMU’s Department of Geosciences Web site.