Egypt is over 95% desert, making a very small proportion of its land suitable for agriculture. As the demand for food grows, the need for agricultural development in desert areas has intensified.

This set of images shows an important land reclamation project in East Oweinat, in the Western Desert of Egypt.

Consisting of a long-time series of over 150 images captured by the US Landsat and the Copernicus Sentinel-2 missions, this comparison highlights how this agricultural project has developed between January 1998 and March 2019.

The circular shapes in the images, each approximately 800 metres wide, indicate the irrigation method used here, with water being supplied by a set of sprinklers rotating around a central pivot. Fossil water, stored underground for thousands of years, comes from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, the largest known fossil aquifer discovered.

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