Israel begins pumping desalinated water into depleted Sea of Galilee

timesofisrael.com

34 points·wslh··4 comments

Israel’s always been strong at “terraforming”. I wonder what unexpected consequences will be encountered though.

Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.

Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.

Everything is trade offs I guess.

Sea of Galilee water level fluctuates by few meters between years, depending on amount of rains at any given year. Current pumping adds 0.5cm/month. Literally drop in the sea.

IIRC reswamping is mostly done for rewilding terrain. A lot of migratory birds passing through area.

The only hard problem caused by "terraforming", it's that because of water from Sea of Galilee not allowed fully to flow to Dead Sea, it's level gone down and it created a lot of sink holes.

To mitigate it, there is another long discussed pumping projects that can't lift off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Water...

Mistakes in terraforming can be fixed with good governance and technology. This is not ancient times when that could cause a civilization to collapse. And terraforming is not something new to modern Israel, the whole Judaean Mountains region is terraces and irrigation systems that are many thousands of years old.

Sounds a bit like the terraforming of Florida. (With similar tales of soldiers during the civil war.)

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