The Tigris-Euphrates alluvial salt marsh has been home to the Marsh Arabs for thousands of years. Their homes are shown in Sumerian art from five thousand years ago.
The Marsh Arabs shared their home with Asian water buffaloes, wolves, and two kinds of otter. If you saw the film Ring of Bright Water, the star was an otter from this region. As many as two-thirds of the waterfowl that winter in the Middle East spend the cold months here: that’s seventy nine species, among them pelicans, flamingoes and many kinds of duck. The bandicoot rat and the Mesopotamian gerbil are only found in the marshes.
The marshes also cleaned the water which flowed into them and supported commercially important fisheries.
After the Shiites rose against Saddam Hussein, he began drying the marshes by channeling water away from them and directly into the Shatt el Arab. Most of the inhabitants were killed or fled to Iran, so that only 40,000 of the original 250,000 to 500,000 people remained. In the first four years, Saddam drained 60 percent of the marsh; today only 7 percent remains.
According to a report made by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2001, the marshlands that once covered between 5,800 and 7,700 square miles now comprised just 386 square miles. UNEP ranked the destruction of the marsh with the desiccation of the Aral Sea and the deforestation of the Amazon as one of the worst environmental disasters in history.
Because of its importance both to birds that live and breed there, and to the migratory birds which use it as a stopover, the loss of the marsh has put 40 species of birds at risk. Seven species are already extinct and the Sacred Ibis and African darter are nearly so.
Many species of fish are also at risk.
Restoration of some of the marshland is possible, but salts in the soil and dams in Syria and Turkey make complete restoration very difficult.
Photos of Marsh Arabs on Flickr
Map and pictures from National Geographic:
Hello,
Your web site is very interesting and a real wake up call, not to
mention informative.
I had never heard of Newton Creek, and was surprised to hear that there were places like that still around in the US. But not that surprised, because there is a river a lot like that here in California. That would be the New River, in Imperial county. I would like to suggest that it be added as one of the “places of interest” on your web site.
Among numerous other references on the web, here is a web site that describes the New River as “the dirtiest river in North America”:
http://www.american.edu/TED/NEW.HTM
One of the worst things about this eyesore is that illegal immigrants actually wade and swim in this thing to try to get into the US. That says a lot about how bad things must be in their native country to endure this sort of thing to get here. I found some other web site (I unfortunately did not save the URL) that has photos of people swimming
in this polluted river at night among soap suds, from the raw sewage and other filth and industrial chemicals.
This has got to be in the list of worst places for sure.
-DC
I am concerned about the longer range effects of the Sun heating up (global warming.) What was the effect ln the area of past warmer climates, as in AD1100 to 1300?