A Massive Oasis Could Ease Suffering in Darfur

Mar. 26, 2008— -- In Darfur, survival is a constant struggle. Poverty, war, violence, and thirst are crushing facts of daily life.

In recent years, the violence and poverty in the region have made headlines and energized activists around the world, but the root of Darfur's problems may be something most of us take for granted — water.

"We desperately need water," a local man named Abdullah told ABC News at a rare oasis in El Fasher, the capital of northern Darfur, where he showed us he was collecting water to take back to his village and sell. "Where people live there is no local water and we have no way to drill wells," he said.

Water in the region is so scarce that some villagers have to travel for hours to reach the nearest well. This trek can often be dangerous — thousands of women have been beaten and raped while searching for water.

Egyptian-American geologist Farouk El Baz hopes to change all of this. El Baz is the Director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, and an expert at radar topography — a scientific technique he has used to find out what lies below the land's surface.

For the last three years, El Baz has been scrutinizing radar images from satellites and a space shuttle mission, hoping to find water under the miles of sand in Darfur.

Now he believes he has found a massive lake, the size of Lake Erie, hidden under the desert. El Baz believes this discovery means a possibility for peace in the region lies buried beneath the desert.

This is not the first time El Baz has made a groundbreaking discovery through the use of radar topography.

In the 1960s, for example, he used this technique to select landing spots for Apollo 11, helping American Astronauts land safely on the moon. And in the 1990s, El Baz discovered water deep under the sands of Egypt and Libya, where he turned the desert into fertile farmland.

He hopes to have the same impact in Darfur, where over 200,000 people have been killed in the country's civil war and 2.5 million displaced.