Contaminated Aquifers Radioactive Water Threatens Middle East By
Markus Becker Spiegel Online 11/05/2012 The Middle East and
North Africa suffer from water shortages and pump millions of
liters a day from ancient aquifers. But the water contains high
levels of naturally-occurring radioactive contamination. Experts
fear this will increase the cancer risk for millions of people.
True masters of water management once lived in the desert of
what is now Jordan. It took the Nabataeans only a few decades to
carve the city of Petra out of sandstone cliffs. In addition to
crafting now world-famous decorative tomb facades, they built a
sophisticated system of water pipes and cisterns, which made it
possible for the city to exist in the dry wilderness in the
first place -- more than 2,000 years ago. Today trucks rumble
through Jordan to supply the population with drinking water. The
water sloshing back and forth in their tanks is often thousands
of years old, pumped from fossil groundwater reservoirs that
filled up when