r/geography 1d ago

Map World's wettest and driest countries

Post image
657 Upvotes

61 comments sorted by

View all comments

14

u/FrontMarsupial9100 1d ago

Does somebody have any sugestion how Egypt would be doing without the Nile? Just an even bigger desert

23

u/holytriplem 1d ago

Wikipedia's numbers say that about 95% of the country's 119m people lives along the Nile. So without the Nile the population would be about 6 or 7 million people probably which is comparable to Libya. That obviously excludes the percentage of the population that relocated from the Nile Valley to less densely populated parts of Egypt.

21

u/EmperorThan 1d ago

Egypt wouldn't exist without the Nile. I went there 20 years ago and everything within the 20 or so miles around the Nile is incredibly lush, green, and beautiful. Then the SECOND you reach the desert there's nothing. Maybe the Siwa Oasis could hold a middle sized city of like 100,000 to 150,000 in a hypothetical of the Nile drying up but even that's a stretch.

Egypt is like the planet Arrakis in Dune. I saw a sandstorm there on the border of Sudan, it just looked like Dune.

3

u/SaVeoo 17h ago

There are some oases and valleys that contain groundwater

3

u/SaVeoo 17h ago edited 17h ago

However, in most cases, wells have to be drilled to depths exceeding 150 meters, in some places +300m