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Environ Earth Sci (2014) 72:18011809 DOI 10.1007/s12665-014-3088-x
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The Lake Manzala of Egypt: an ambiguous future
Mohamed E. Hereher
Received: 14 September 2013 / Accepted: 20 January 2014 / Published online: 1 February 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
Abstract The Lake Manzala of Egypt has a relatively short history and its future, however, is uncertain. The lake which was the biggest coastal wetland along the Mediterranean Coast is moving toward its disappearance by two opposite forces, one of them is the shrinking of the water body by siltation of sediments coming from agricultural lands and the abundance of weeds and swamp vegetation as well as the drying practices for agriculture, whereas the other force incorporates the removal of the coastal sand bar separating the lake from the Mediterranean Sea by erosion, which should eventually lead to the conversion of the lake into a coastal embayment instead of being a closed coastal lagoon. The study provided a spatiotemporal change analysis of the lake using remotely sensed data.
Keywords Lake Manzala MODIS Landsat
Shrinking Coastal erosion
Introduction
The Egyptian coastal lakes
The modern Nile Delta was established some 6,000 years ago when the sea level had stabilized at its current stage after a long history of uctuation up and down from the present level (Stanley and Warne 1994). The Nile delta, which was formed from the detrital sediments coming from the Ethiopian highlands with the Nile River ooding throughout its history comprise four coastal lakes, namely:
Manzala, Burullus, Edku and Mariut. Dumont and El-Shabrawy (2007) attributed the formation of these coastal lakes into two processes: subsidence and coastal erosion. The continuous compaction of the sediment column under the effect of weight has caused the delta to sink by a rate of 45 m per 1,000 years (Stanley 1988). Maximum subsidence (5 mm/year) was observed at the eastern part of the Lake Manzala (the lake under consideration). Delta subsidence is therefore responsible for the submergence of the coastal area. On the other hand, the sediments that once deposited along the Mediterranean Sea coast from the Nile River branches during ooding season had been reworked by the wave action and were eroded and moved by the eastward long shore currents under the effect of the northwesterly winds...