By Professor Francis Dov Por (auth.)
There are few achievements of contemporary guy which may examine to the Suez Canal. In Egypt-the land of the main well-known wonders of antiquity-the Suez Canal was once equipped because the first technical ask yourself ofthe commercial revolution. Ferdinand de Lesseps was once a guy straddling epochs-the romantic utopism of Saint Simon and the trendy global of technocracy. the big venture used to be at its begin shouldered through the crowds of tens of millions of pressured employees nonetheless to be had and ended as a show-piece for contemporary mechanical earth-moving concepts. The canal developers themselves have been nonetheless polyhistors within the outdated experience: engineers cum-zoologists; naval officers-cum-geologists; diplomats meddling with chem istry. throughout the 4 generations of the life of the Suez Canal, the fateful expert narrowmindedness turned steadily worse. The engineers con tinued their paintings in and round the Canal, yet they grew to become oblivious and unresponsive to the environmental impression, to the attention-grabbing alterations within the biotic surroundings which they have been generating with their very own hands.
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Sample text
Lake Menzaleh is a brackish oligohaline waterbody, 1 to 2 m deep, periodically supplied with fresh water from the Nile Delta. A few kilometers south ofPort Said there is a narrow channe1 with a lock which connects Lake Menzaleh and the Canal. The Canal works started in the Menzaleh section. In the very first phases waters ofthis lake served to fill the first "service channel". The following 30 km are artificially dug either through the salt and gypsum swamp of Ballah or through a sandy ridge which at EI Guisr (km 72) reaches a height of 23 m.
Fuch . 9. Geological map ofthe Isthmus ofSuez (from Fuchs, 1878) The Pleistocene and Postpleistocene History of the Isthmus of Suez 27 The assumption of a Pleistocene strait-like contact between the two seas, leading through a brackish lagoon-like area, was first proposed by Vassel (published in 1889) and accepted by Fuchs (1881) and by Keller (1882). These authors compare the hypothetical situation of the Isthmus of Suez with the Gulf of River Amur, the shallow Straits of Tartaria which separate the Island of Sakhalin from the Siberian mainland.
The case of the present-day Persian Gulf, amply supplied with the fresh water of three big rivers at its far end-the Euphrates, Tigris, and Karun-but with open-sea salinity of around 40%0, shows that high evaporation and isolation from the open ocean are of overwhelming importance. There are no indications as to the amount of salinity increase. This has to be extrapolated from the alternation of stenohaline and euryhaline planktonic organisms. It seems likely that euryhalinity and eurythermy were the important survival factors during the changing oceanographic conditions ofthe Upper Pleistocene.