Most of the water in Lake Chad has disappeared. The lake now covers less than a tenth of its 1960s area, yet more than 30 million people in Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger still rely on it for water and food, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory report. That crisis has led engineers to revive an old, ambitious plan: Transaqua, a 2,400 km canal to bring water from the Congo River basin all the way to Lake Chad.
A 2,400 km canal is roughly the same distance as driving from New York City to Denver. Now imagine engineers digging a canal that long, just to take water from one river system to a completely different one. That’s really what Transaqua is proposing.
