Spanning across two north African countries – southern Egypt and northern Sudan – is the vast reservoir of Lake Nasser.
Created by the construction of the Aswan High Dam between 1960 and 1970, it is one of the largest man-made lakes in the world.
The lake is some 298 miles long and 9.9 miles across at its widest point, which lies near the Tropic of Cancer. It covers a total surface area of 2,030 square miles and has a storage capacity of around 32 cubic miles of water, or 132 cubic kilometres.
Before its creation, the project faced strong opposition, as it would require many people to be resettled.
The lake has become an important economic resource in Egypt, improving agriculture and promoting robust fishing and tourism industries.
Strictly speaking, “Lake Nasser” refers only to the much larger portion of the lake found in Egyptian territory, which makes up 83 percent of the total. The Sudanese prefer to call their smaller body of water Lake Nubia.
Before the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the area that the lake now occupies was a significant part of the region of Nubia, home to several pharaohs of Egypt and empires including the Kush, which existed from around 780 BC to 350 AD.
The construction of the dam began in 1960 at the behest of Lake Nasser’s namesake and the second president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Finished in 1970, the dam across the Nile was built to replace the insufficient Aswan Low Dam built in 1902.
The goals of the High Dam and the reservoir were to create a more stable source of water, to increase agricultural production and to produce electricity for Egypt. It produces about 2.1 gigawatts of hydroelectricity, providing a significant percentage of Egypt’s electricity needs – up to half in 1970.
The project initially faced opposition from Sudan as it would encroach on land in the northern part of the country, where tens of thousands of Nubian people lived (a Nilo-Saharan speaking ethnic group indigenous to the region and believed to be one of the earliest cradles of civilisation), who would have to be resettled.
In the end, Sudan’s land near the area of Lake Nasser was mostly flooded by the lake.
The construction also sparked an international movement to preserve the history of the region, as many ancient monuments and artefacts that lay in the area to be flooded would be lost. Due to this, an international effort was made to rescue and relocate many of the ancient sites and artefacts that were threatened which culminated in the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia led by UNESCO.
Though many sights were saved and relocated, such as the temples of Kalabsha and Wadi es-Sebua, some sites such as the fortress of Buhen now rest underwater.
Ezzat Awad, an oceanologist and former director of Egypt’s fisheries authority told The New Arab that up to 10,000 African Nile crocodiles, the only crocodile species in Egypt, live in Lake Nasser. The Nile crocodile is the second largest species of crocodile in the world, with adults averaging between 2.5 and five metres and weighing between 70 and 700 kilograms.
However, environmental experts believe that crocodiles might have crossed the Aswan High Dam as Nile water levels were being topped up, and slowly made their way north. In 2016, residents of Cairo’s Mostorod suburb were horrified to discover that their newest neighbour was one such crocodile, said The New Arab.
The damming of the Nile has also resulted in several ecological consequences because the natural flow and process of the river were interrupted. This included the interruption of the flow of nutrient-rich sediments down the stream of the Nile which provided much of the needed nutrients for agriculture along the river. Consequently, Egyptian farmers have been forced to resort to mineral fertilisers to maintain arable land for growing crops as in other countries.
Overall, however, Lake Nasser has provided a large boon to the Egyptian agricultural industry, which employs about a quarter of the population and is a vital sector. In the years immediately following the filling of the lake, Egypt’s arable land increased by about 30 percent.
