The marshes of Mesopotamia, thought by some biblical scholars to be the site of the Garden of Eden, could be restored, scientists will reveal this week.
An area of Iraq’s wetland, originally twice the size of the Florida Everglades but extensively drained by Saddam Hussein’s regime, could be on the road to recovery.
The marshes — home to fish, millions of wading and migrating birds and a 5 000-year-old Marsh Arab culture based on artificial islands and houses made from tall reeds — lie at the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They were reduced to 7% of their original extent of 12 800 sq kilometres during Saddam’s rule.
”This environmental disaster has been compared in scale to the drying up of the Aral Sea in central Asia and to the deforestation of the Amazon,” Curtis Richardson of Duke University, North Carolina, and colleagues, will report in the journal Science on Friday.
But the remaining marshland showed surprising resilience. ”The high quality of the water, the existing soil conditions and the presence of stocks of native species in some regions indicate that the restoration potential for a significant portion of the Mesopotamian marshes is high.”
Researchers moved into the marshes and began working with Iraqi scientists after United States and British forces toppled the Saddam regime, Dr Richardson told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.
Much of the marshland had been drained and turned over to wheat. Water upstream was dammed or diverted for irrigation. Soil, normally washed clean of pollutants each spring by the flow of meltwater from the Iranian and Turkish mountains, became poisoned by the build-up of salt.
Up to 100 000 Marsh Arabs were killed by Saddam’s soldiers. Whole villages were moved, some many times, and tens of thousands settled in refugee camps in Iran. In a region where rainfall is 10cm a year and evaporation rates 500cm a year, 90% of the marshes began to turn seemingly inexorably to desert. Kuwait City had to use sand ploughs to clear the dust blown south from what had once been wetland.
After the defeat of Saddam and the occupation of Baghdad, uncontrolled releases of water from the rivers, combined with high rainfall, reflooded 20% of the marshes.
Scientists backed by the US agency for international development, working with limited funds, began to examine selected areas of the remaining natural marsh. They found saltpans, baked mudflats, areas of scrub — and flooded regions with luxuriant vegetation and returning populations of marble teal, pelicans, pygmy cormorants and the otter species Lutra lutra that entered the literary pantheon of animals in Gavin Maxwell’s classic Ring of Bright Water.
”One of the great tragedies of this whole areas is that looking at the marshes themselves is not of primary importance to the future of Iraq,” Richardson said. ”To an ecologist, they are an ecological disaster, but they are also a human disaster and I think it is really critical that we get the international community to focus on doing more to restore the marshes.”
”The future of this area will depend directly on the quantity of water. Turkey and Iran control a tremendous amount … Turkey could cut off almost all of the flow of the Euphrates.”
He added: ”Inside, the country is basically fighting for water for cities, for agriculture. So, essentially, the marshes’ water has been moved north.” – Guardian Unlimited Â