Answer: What's the most significant thing going on here? (2/3)

This is even bigger than I thought...  

How DO we approach a research problem like this?  

P/C Google Earth

The bigger SRS Challenge for us  is... how much has Lake Nasser changed the lands around it?  

Here’s part 2 of our mini-series on answering this complex question about the effects of creating Lake Nasser.  

An ‘ordinary’ search for the obvious query might be: 

 

  [ effects of creating Lake Nasser ]

 

This gives a bunch of ordinary organic results in the way we're used to doing--but the AI powered list at the top gives a set of positive and negative effects as well. 

Seeing this list made me think that comparing the 4 top LLM systems answers to this question would be interesting.  Here’s the list of effects given by each of the most popular LLM question-answering systems: 

 

Gemini

 

Positive effects:

Increased agricultural productivity: By regulating Nile flooding, Lake Nasser allows for controlled irrigation, enabling increased crop yields and expanded agricultural land in Egypt.

 

Hydroelectric power generation: The dam generates substantial electricity for Egypt.

 

Flood control: The reservoir behind the dam helps mitigate devastating Nile floods.

 

Negative effects:

Population displacement: The flooding caused by Lake Nasser led to the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Nubian people from their traditional homes in both Egypt and Sudan.

 

Loss of archaeological sites: Ancient Egyptian temples and other archaeological sites were submerged by the rising water levels, including parts of the Abu Simbel complex which required costly relocation efforts.

 

Reduced soil fertility: The Nile's natural silt deposition, which enriched downstream agricultural lands, was significantly reduced due to the dam, necessitating increased reliance on artificial fertilizers.

 

Ecological disruption: Changes in water flow and sediment levels impacted the aquatic ecosystem of the Nile, affecting fish populations and other aquatic life.

 

Potential for waterborne diseases: Stagnant water in the reservoir could create conditions favorable for the spread of waterborne diseases if not properly managed.

 

 

Copilot lists these as the major effects, a mix of positive and negative: 

 

Displacement of Nubians: Tens of thousands of Nubian people were forced to relocate from their ancestral lands, which were submerged by the lake.

 

Environmental Impact: The damming of the Nile altered the natural flow of nutrients, impacting the sardine fishery in the eastern Mediterranean. It also led to changes in the local ecosystem, affecting flora and fauna..

 

Agricultural Benefits: The reservoir provided a stable water source for irrigation, transforming previously arid land into productive farmland.

 

Hydroelectric Power: The dam generates hydroelectric power, contributing significantly to Egypt's energy supply.

 

Flood Control: The dam helps control the Nile's flooding, protecting downstream areas from catastrophic floods.

 

Tourism and Recreation: Lake Nasser has become a popular destination for tourists and offers recreational activities.

 

 

Claude tells us that:

 

Environmental Effects: The creation of Lake Nasser fundamentally altered the Nile River ecosystem. The massive reservoir submerged vast areas of land, creating one of the world's largest artificial lakes. This led to significant changes including:

 

Disruption of the natural flood cycle that had historically deposited fertile silt along the Nile Valley.

Increased evaporation of water from the large surface area, leading to some water loss

Creation of new aquatic habitats, supporting different fish species and wildlife

Prevention of nutrient-rich sediments from reaching the Mediterranean, affecting marine ecosystems

 

Social and Cultural Impacts:

The formation of the lake had profound effects on local communities:

 

Forced relocation of over 100,000 Nubian people from their ancestral lands

Submergence of numerous archaeological sites, though many were rescued through UNESCO's salvage campaign

Loss of traditional farming practices that depended on annual flooding

Creation of new fishing communities around the lake

 

Economic Benefits:

Lake Nasser provided several economic advantages:

 

Improved flood control, protecting Egyptian communities from devastating floods

Enhanced hydroelectric power generation, providing electricity for development

Creation of a significant fishing industry on the lake

 

Increased agricultural stability through regulated water supply

 

Development of tourism around both the dam and lake

 

Agricultural Changes:

The lake's formation transformed Egyptian agriculture:

 

Year-round irrigation became possible, allowing multiple growing seasons

 

Loss of natural soil fertilization from flood sediments, increasing reliance on artificial fertilizers

 

Expansion of irrigated agriculture in previously marginal areas

 

Changes in crop patterns and farming techniques

 

Long-term Challenges:

Several ongoing issues emerged:

 

Accumulation of sediments in the reservoir, reducing storage capacity

 

Increased soil salinization in some agricultural areas due to changed irrigation patterns

 

Coastal erosion along the Nile Delta due to reduced sediment flow

 

Management of water resources during drought periods

 

 

 

ChatGPT lists these as the major effects, a mix of positive and negative, as well as giving a few future-looking results as well: 

 

Positive Effects

Water Regulation and Flood Control: The Aswan High Dam allowed Egypt to regulate the flow of the Nile, preventing devastating annual floods that historically damaged crops and settlements. It enabled year-round irrigation, improving agricultural productivity.

 

Hydroelectric Power Generation: The dam provides a significant portion of Egypt's electricity, supporting industrialization and improving living standards.

 

Reservoir for Drought Periods:  Lake Nasser acts as a vast reservoir, storing water during high-flow years for use in drought periods, ensuring water security for agriculture and drinking.

 

Fisheries Development:  The lake has become a source of fish, providing livelihoods and a food source for local communities.

 

Economic Growth:  With water availability and energy production, Egypt advanced in industrial and agricultural sectors.

 

Negative Effects

 

Environmental Changes:  The dam traps silt that would have naturally replenished the fertile Nile Delta, leading to soil degradation and increased reliance on chemical fertilizers.

 

Erosion of the Nile Delta: Without sediment deposits, the delta is eroding, threatening coastal ecosystems and agriculture.

 

Displacement of Communities:  Approximately 100,000 Nubians were displaced, losing their ancestral lands and heritage as the area was submerged.

 

Cultural and Archaeological Loss:  Important historical sites, such as ancient Nubian temples, were submerged. Some, like Abu Simbel, were relocated, but many were lost.

 

Ecological Disruptions: Changes in the river’s flow and temperature have affected ecosystems downstream, reducing biodiversity and altering fish populations.

 

Increased Evaporation: Lake Nasser’s large surface area in a hot desert climate leads to significant water loss due to evaporation, reducing the overall water availability.

 

Impact on Downstream Nations:  The regulation of Nile flow has created tensions with downstream countries, particularly Sudan and Ethiopia, regarding water-sharing rights and access.

 

Long-Term Implications

 

Climate Change Amplification:  The dam and lake exacerbate vulnerabilities to climate change, such as rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns in the Nile Basin.

 

Transboundary Water Conflicts: The dam has intensified debates over water use, particularly with Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), complicating regional water diplomacy.

 

Sustainability Challenges:  High sedimentation rates within Lake Nasser could reduce its storage capacity over time, challenging its effectiveness.

 

 

As you can see, the LLMs vary a bit from one to the other.  Here’s a table of the different factors that each system mentions:

 

(Click on this image to expand.) 

Each row shows the agreement between the systems.  Gemini lists 3 positives and 5 negatives while ChatGPT lists 5 positives and 12 negatives.  Blanks point out the places where one of the LLMs does NOT mention one of the factors.  Only ChatGPT suggests that Lake Nasser would be a net positive factor for economic growth, and only ChatGPT mentions increased salinization as a net negative factor. 

And, as you can see, each of the systems has a fairly different take on the effects of the Aswan Dam and the creation of Lake Nasser.  

It’s pretty clear that Gemini has the simplest take on the question, while ChatGPT has the broadest list of factors.  Oddly, only Gemini mentions “potential for waterborne diseases” and only Claude mentions “increased salinization” as possible issues while both Gemini and ChatGPT list “loss of archaeological sites” as a problem.

As a SearchResearcher you need to keep these differences in mind.  One system isn’t necessarily better than the others, but they DO have very different takes on what our research question means.  

Obviously, for a full SRS style research analysis, you’d want to dig into each of these factors and get some ground truth about each of these questions. Is Claude correct in telling us that "increased salinization" is an issue? Is Gemini right about how building of the Aswan dam will increase the potential for waterborne diseases? 

We could spend another complete post on that waterborne disease issue alone!  (And if you know me, we probably will do exactly that.)  

But if you've been paying attention to the SearchResearch space, in the past couple of months several new research tools have become available that might be incredibly useful for exactly this type of deeper research.  

Undermind.ai and Google’s new Deep Research are systems that purport to take your deep research questions and do a great, focused, detailed analysis for you… exactly the kind of thing we’re asking for in this SRS Challenge.  

For our next post, we’ll try each of these new “deep research” tools and see how well they do with our Lake Nasser Challenge.

Keep searching!

Answer: What's the most significant thing going on here? (part 1/3)

 I knew this would be a big Challenge...  

... but it's a great example of the kind of SearchResearch questions that arise from the simplest of thoughts.  Simple questions can quickly lead to deep / sophisticated research.  

P/C Google Earth

The bigger question for us is this week is... how much has Lake Nasser changed the lands around it?  

Here's a closeup of a piece of the Lake Nasser shore now: 

As you can see, there are now a LOT of trees and bushes that are well-irrigated by the lake's rise and fall with the annual rains.  

This is one effect of creating Lake Nasser, there are probably others.  In particular, how does all of this new vegetation change the environment?  Is it unimportant? Or does it profoundly change things?  

For the last SRS Challenge of 2024, I'd like you to do a little bit of analysis and find out: 

1. What has been the most important change in the Lake Nasser region since the lake was created in 1970?  We know the effects of creating the reservoir for Egypt downstream of Aswan, but what about the region upstream (i.e., to the south)?  

As I said, there's no single obviously correct answer to this question--and that's part of the point. 

So... how does one approach such an all-encompassing question?   

My first thought was to look for time-lapse images to get an overview.  As we've discussed before (2017--Seeing Across Time;  2020--Time Lapse for Fires, there are handy time lapse Earth viewing tools (e.g., Google Time Lapse or the NASA Worldview site).  

Let's dive into a time-lapse analysis and then take a second approach in the next post.  

Here's a video that I made from the Google Time Lapse site showing the changes over the past 23 years:  

This is one way to get a great overview of the area and the substantial changes that can be seen.  Not only can you see the edges of the Nile fluctuate, growing and shrinking a bit with each season, but you can also see the sudden appearance in 1999 of a set of lakes that magically appear in 1999 (in the center of the images). These are the Toshka Lakes.  

The Toshka Lakes appear when Lake Nasser has excess capacity and overflows its banks. As a precaution against any unexpected rise in Lake Nasser's water level, a spillway and channel were built in 1978. That spillway pointed towards the low-lying area that are now the Toshka Lakes. 

In 1997, the Egyptian government decided to develop the Toshka Lakes region, where planned agricultural and industrial communities would develop. It has been an ambitious project which was meant to help Egypt cope with its rapidly growing population and create additional farmlands to feed the people.  

Luckily for the government, the Toshka Lakes initially formed from massive flash floods and river floods in Ethiopia the next year (1998). The Aswan High Dam managed the flow for a while, but the flood control plan called for diverting excess water to the Toshka Lakes region. The excess water flowed through the spillway, just as planned and formed a series of lakes, just as planned. As a consequence, agricultural activity in the Toshka Lakes region rose rapidly in the 2000s, but soon the water levels of the lakes declined and became empty again by 2018.

You can see this in these side-by-side images taken from the video. The lakes appeared in late 1999 and show up first in the image from 2000. (They were large and obvious enough to be noticed by astronauts on the ISS.)  

By late 2018, the lakes are empty (see center image below).  The lakes are refilled after heavy rainfall in Sudan and South Sudan in the summer of 2019 with major flooding events in Sudan in 2020, 2021, and 2022. 

Initially, the flooding of the low-lying depression was a side-effect of heavy rain pouring too much water into Lake Nasser.  The depressions filled up with water, and voila--instant farmland. (It's unclear how much of this is a happy accident vs. pre-planned.  It feels like there's a bit of revisionist history in the telling of the formation of Toshka Lakes from sites I can find.)   

In any case, it's a real thing now, with a permanent canal--the Sheikh Zayad Canal--to keep pumping water from Lake Nasser from the Mubarak Pumping station into the Toshka Lakes, with lots of peripheral canals to water the farms.  As you can see, they're mostly center pivot irrigation (previous SRS about center pivot), mostly growing wheat, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, beans. okra, and green peppers. 

Base map from Google Maps. Annotation by Dan showing the course of the Sheikh Zayad Canal.  
The Mubarak Pumping Station is in the lower right on the shore of Lake Nasser.

While the canal was planned to be 320 km in length, currently only about 129 km (as I measured it on Google Maps)--that's a lot of canal, with plenty left to build.  

All of this is pretty obvious by looking at the time-lapse images.  

Building the High Dam at Aswan allowed for the entire Toshka Lakes project. It's a huge project that's been in process for 27 years, surviving as different governments come and go (and shift in their level of support--a characteristic for many multi-year government projects).  

And it's also clear that there's a lot of shift in the lake shoreline as the rains vary from year to year.  Here's a comparison of two different years at the Mubarak Pumping Station.  Notice the differences between a high-water year and a low-water year.  

Some of the islands that are evident in 2012 are not to be found in the 2004 (high water) image.  

What does this mean for the plants and animals of Lake Nasser?  

We'll pick up this theme in the next post.  (This one is getting too long as it is.  More tomorrow!)  

Keep searching!