The pressing drought pushes us to look for solutions, now and several centuries ago. Scientists from the University of Almería have shown that the Romans already generated a significant environmental impact to correct the lack of water, altering the hydrology of a lake in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. The intervention was a failure.
To satisfy the high demand for water for urban and agricultural use in the central area of ??Andalusia in the era of ancient civilization, “streams were derived that naturally fed wetlands, as is the case of the Zóñar Lagoon (Córdoba). deepest in Andalusia with up to 16 meters depth at present”, as explained in the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
They resorted to this practice when they faced periods of intense drought, “in which it rained up to 20% less than today,” the university explains in a press release.
However, these derivations had negative effects on the Zóñar Lagoon. “Through the analysis of stable isotopes of the sediments of this lake, it has been proven that around the 1st century AD its level was only 3 meters deep,” they point out in their conclusions.
In addition, this group of scientists found that the “water was much saltier than today”, something they attribute to both “the lack of rain and the diversion by the Romans of the springs that feed the lake.”
“It shows that 2,000 years ago humans generated a significant impact on the environment, in this case almost drying up one of the deepest lakes in Andalusia,” they conclude.
To reach that conclusion, a stable isotope analysis of the sediments was carried out, an innovative methodology, which “is only applied in three other laboratories worldwide.” “It has been a multidisciplinary task, crossing geochemical data, hydrochemical parameters measured over the last 35 years and results of archaeological campaigns in the environment,” they detail.
For Fernando Gázquez, one of the members of the research team, this work “is one of the first evidence of the impact of the Romans on the hydrological functioning of wetlands and shows, in turn, that periods of prolonged drought , like those of us who are living in the current era, also put past civilizations on the ropes.
Furthermore, he highlights that they focus on the “exact values ??of climatic variables in past periods”: “In this work we put for the first time absolute values ??of atmospheric humidity and the amount of rain in a key historical period in the Iberian Peninsula such as the Roman”.
