OSU professor addresses water scarcity in Iraq

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Tulsa native is one of the few experts in the world on ancient aqueduct systems.

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UNESCO release

(STILLWATER, OK – November 23, 2009) An Oklahoma State University geography professor’s work studying ancient underground irrigation systems has received some international press while also highlighting the systems’ decay in northeastern Iraq.

Dale Lightfoot’s work with UNESCO, studying karezes, also known as qanats, has appeared in the BBC, Associated Press, New York Times and in a full report featured on UNESCO’s home page. His work, recently the subject of a UNESCO documentary, found the systems decimated by poor maintenance and overuse, as well as stubborn droughts – findings that were big news to the world water resources community.

“Drought is impacting tens of thousands of villagers there,” said Lightfoot, noting that many of them survive by growing their own food. “As a result, there is a migration underway and one that has been for a few years. More will leave if something isn’t done to stem the flow.” Migrations could harm the relative stability of the Kurdish-controlled region that largely escaped violence in southern Iraq following the United States’ 2003 invasion.

The underground aqueducts, some of which are about 1,500 years old, honeycomb that corner of Iraq, largely due to its close proximity to Iran. Lightfoot said many academics credit the Iranians’ Persian ancestors with inventing the systems centuries before the Romans devised their aqueducts.

Karezes work using deep wells dug in porous soils near shallow aquifers, allowing groundwater to seep into them. Then, tunnels are dug, by hand and often through bedrock, at a gentle slope connecting the central wells to lower ones dug at strategic points in the area. Maintenance shafts peek out of the ground every 60 feet or so.

Joined by OSU geography doctoral student, interpreter and fieldwork coordinator Hawta Al-Khayyat and a driver, Lightfoot went from village to village, chatting up locals for information on the local karezes and asking who owns them. Sometimes braving areas sprinkled with land mines from the Iran-Iraq war, they inspected 683 karezes often marked only by large, gaping holes in the dusty ground.

The feats of engineering – accomplished by people without advanced technology – never ceased to amaze him, he said. Out of the ones they inspected, they found 116 still in operation. In 2004, he estimates there were 380 still working. Some are as deep as 140 feet (the deepest he has ever found was in Jordan – nearly 200 feet and dug by the Romans).

The tunnels can get clogged with debris and suffer from cave-ins. That decline can be thwarted, he said, by better upkeep, less water usage and more rainfall, he said.

Local villages used to have people who kept them flowing, but those experts are becoming fewer and more expensive to employ, the professor said. That is part of what caused UNESCO and the Iraqi government to study the systems, record their locations and see about improving them.

“UNESCO has been promoting the impact of the drought findings here because this is something they can use as an impetus to pouring funds into revitalizing them for drought mitigation and rural development,” he said.

Lightfoot had previously been to the nation in 2004 and 2005 to develop new centers for GPS and geographic information systems (digital one-stop shops that compile geologic, geographic and other data for analysis), as well as other higher education projects with the U.S. Agency for International Development. But his trip to Iraq last June and July was the latest in his work studying the irrigation systems, part of a path that during his career has taken him from Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea to Tunisia in North Africa and Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula.

His doctoral degree is from the University of Colorado. He holds a master’s degree in geography from OSU, as well as a bachelor’s degree in industrial arts education. He is an expert in resource management, cultural ecology, groundwater and irrigation in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

The geography department is one of 24 departments in the College of Arts and Sciences at OSU. To learn more, visit cas.okstate.edu. For more information about Lightfoot’s research, phone (405) 744-6250.