Great Man-Made River

Schematic drawing of the project. Note that different routes have been proposed for the not-yet-implemented phases (dashed). Tobruk may for instance end up connected to Ajdabiya instead of to the Jaghboub well field.

The Great Man-Made River (GMMR, Arabic: النهر الصناعي العظيم, romanized: an-nahr aṣ-ṣināʿiyy al-ʿaẓīm, Italian: Grande fiume artificiale) is a network of pipes that supplies fresh water obtained from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer across Libya. It is the world's largest irrigation project.[1] The project utilizes a pipeline system that pumps water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System from southern Libya to cities in the populous Libyan northern Mediterranean coast including Tripoli and Benghazi. The water covers a distance of up to 1,600 kilometers and provides 70% of all freshwater used in Libya.[2]

According to the project's website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2,820 kilometres (1,750 mi))[3] and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere in Libya. The late Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi described it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".[4]

  1. ^ Guinness World Records 2008 Book Archived 2015-09-24 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 978-1-904994-18-3
  2. ^ Moutaz Ali (2017). "The Eighth Wonder of the World?". Quantara.de. Archived from the original on 2021-12-19. Retrieved 2019-11-30.
  3. ^ Keys, D., 2011, Libya Tale of Two Fundamentally Different Cities, BBC Knowledge Asia Edition, Vol.3 Issue 7
  4. ^ "Water-Technology". Archived from the original on 2020-08-16. Retrieved 2004-10-14.