The Qattara Depression and Siwa Oasis The Qattara Depression, covering an
area of nearly 20,000 km2
, lies 60–135 m below sea level and is surrounded by
escarpments and steep ridges of the Miocene and the Eocene. In the depres-
sion itself we find salt lakes and clay plains, which are inhospitable to man.
In the 1970s a gigantic project for the production of electric power using sea
water that was to be diverted over 50 km into the depression with the help of
a canal was envisaged here. Evaporation from the lake surface was to provide
a constant gradient, so as to keep the artificial waterfall running (see Ibrahim
1982a). The project was first conceived by the German geographer Albrecht
Penck in 1916. One of the main reasons why the idea never materialized was
the expected high cost, estimated in 1980 at about US$5 billion, since two
tunnels would have had to be built. It would have been much cheaper to
have used nuclear explosives, but the international donors who had shown an
interest in the project finally withdrew from it for environmental reasons.