The Most Perfect Ecosystem: The Qanat Karez Salt Leaching Oasis of The Ancient Silk Road, As the Model of Aquaculture and Chemical Engineering to Transform Our Present-Day Agriculture and Climate Temperature by David Bloch in Open Access Journal of Environmental and Soil Sciences in Lupine Publishers
More than 150,000 Gallerias, Qanat Karez sweet water systems, including more than 200,000 kilo meters of tunnels still exist in the Middle East, Central Asia and Mediterranean basins. Since the Islamic agricultural revolution which took control of these water sources, they are operated inefficiently losing uncontrolled quantities of water. The original ancient design was to direct water to arid zone of sabkha basins in order to leach salt deposits by leaching, (you have used leaching twice) recrystallizing and precipitating the salts as pure thick strata S of salt crust. The tunnels are used today only for domestic and local agricultural water supply. The engineering and construction of these systems involved extremely heavy investment, in difficult desert conditions. The human cost of building the tunnels and boreholes could only have been justified by the value of the salt production resulting from the irrigation and flooding mechanisms. This forgotten technology is no longer in use and the misunderstanding has caused misuse and inefficiency Many communities still rely on the ancient Qanat.
