GIS Development Weekly March 24, 2008

The legacy of Egypt's World War II invasion by Germany hampers Egypt's access to potentially vast energy resources. There are more than 20 million landmines, grenades and bombs that are waiting below the surface to cause havoc if they go off. That pins Egypt next to Afghanistan as one of the most heavily mined countries in the word. In 2006 the U.N. Development Program reported that since the end of World War II, approximately 8,000 people have died as a result of land mines in Egypt's northwest alone. Besides human lives, there are further costs connected to the presence of explosives. Here, in the northwestern deserts, lie buried rich reserves of oil, natural gas and ores, the exploration of many of which is complicated because of the explosives in the ground. Roughly 1 billion cubic meters of underground water reserves are made inaccessible by the presence of mines and unexploded remnants of war, or EWR, and similar inaccessibility exists for roughly 4.8 million barrels of oil and 13.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The mines are WW II vintage - which does not make them any more safe than those recently planted in Afghanistan. Let us hope that better sense has prevailed on the 'farmers' who sowed these seeds of destruction to have had maintained coordinate databases of all they planted. What better use for a Mil Spec GPS... more...

NASA has used the latest satellite capabilities to distinguish industrial pollution and smoke from dust transported to the western regions of North America from East Asia. Looking at four years of data from 2002 to 2005 they estimated the amount of pollution arriving in North America from East Asia, to be equivalent to about 15 percent of local emissions of the U.S. and Canada. This is a significant percentage at a time when the U.S. is trying to decrease pollution emissions to boost overall air quality. This means that any reduction their emissions may be offset by the pollution aerosols coming from East Asia and other regions.

role of GIS in WW II...

The minefields of Egypt – WW II vintage still have 20 million or so pieces of unexploded ordnance, which is preventing the country from exploring for oil as well as exploiting these areas for tourism, reads a recent news article. My first thoughts were – why not use the maps which must have been made when the mines were laid? It has been reported that Germany has already handed over the maps to Egypt. Sifting through volumes of text, the conclusion : The shifting sand makes it impossible to locate the buried mines!!! This is apparently the official line from the Egyptian army. To add to the chaos, there are three to four generations of mines in these minefields in North Egypt. Made me think of layers in a GIS... though in this case the GI about these killer goodies is missing. So WWII still continues in Egypt...

Afghanistan ranks second in matters of buried treasures (the killer kind), left behind by the Russians. The U.S Army National Ground Intelligence Centre has extensively used GIS to inform soldiers about minefield locations during operation 'Enduring Freedom'

The extremes of devious technology not surprising comes from the same labs which also deliver to the world some of the most useful devices and innovations. The 'Self-healing minefields' from DARPA is a spine chiller by any standards even today, though what I read is about five years old - “Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf computer chips and "healing" software, the networked minefield detects rude attempts to clear it, deduces which parts of itself have been removed, and signals its remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics. The mines, which can hop, then redistribute themselves, frustrating the enemy and quite probably terrifying him in the process” says G Smith. I am forced to retract my comment in today's top story about the good use of Mil Spec GPS...

Dr. Hrishikesh Samant
hrishikesh@gisdevelopment.net