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Tell me morę: Nile floods

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■    During the summer rainy season, so much water flows down the Blue Nile that it once flooded the banks of the Nile in Egypt.

I As it receded, the floodwater left behind a layer of fertile black silt that enriched the soil, enabling the local farmers to grow crops.

■    Despite the agricultural value of the floods, they could be destructive, so in the 1900s two dams were built

at Aswan in Southern Egypt to control the water flow.

■    Today, the River Nile no longer floods every summer, and the supply of fertile soil has dried up.

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In numbers

RECORD BREAKER

Lakę Victoria, the source of the White Nile, is the largest tropical lakę, with an area of 26,564 sq miles (68,800 sq km) It is also the third largest of all lakes—the Caspian Sea and Lakę Superior are larger.

Pyramids

The ancient Egyptians built morę than 100 pyramids (tombs for royalty) along the west bank of the Nile.

Cotton is grown along the banks of the Nile.

Aswan High Dam

I don’t I believe it ■

At least half of the water that flows into the reed swamp known as the Sudd never flows out—it just evaporates. This means that the river flowing out of the Sudd is only half the size of the one that flows into it.

Egyptian desert

In northern Sudan and Egypt, the river flows almost entirely through desert. The river bank is green, but the hills are madę of rock and sand.

Nile Delta

North of Cairo, the River Nile flows over the fertile, low-lying Nile Delta and into the Mediterranean Sea.

01: The flow of the Nile through Egypt is controlled by the Aswan High Dam, which uses the energy of the river to generate electricity.

02: Completed in 1970 after ten years of work, the dam is 364 ft (111 m) high and replaces an earlier, much lower dam from 1902.

03: The valley above the dam is now a huge reservoir called Lakę Nasser. It is 342 miles (550 km) long and holds morę than 24 miles³ (100 km³) of water.

04: The water in Lakę Nasser helped protect Egypt from the drought and terrible famines that hit the Sudan and Ethiopia in the 1980s.

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