Iraq’s ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, reports Hannah Lynch writing in The Guardian.
Water shortages from dams on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Turkey and Iran, along with drought, evaporation, and hot conditions, are increasing salt concentrations that dissolve the bricks used by the ancients to build humanity's first cities and agricultural centers in what is known as Mesopotamia. The soil and water wells are rich in salt to this day.
Salt was a mixed bag for the ancient cities. It was used to preserve food and for emerging industries of the times. The salt was likely traded to other areas to preserve fish and meat as well as fish sauce. It could also lay waste to agricultural fields when salt from the water of the Tigris and Euphrates was used for irrigation of agricultural fields. Repeated irrigation increased the salt concentration in the soil, stunting and harming crops that eventually made the fields too salty for crops. Ultimately, the ground could no longer be cultivated.
Because of drought and evaporation of water bodies in parts of modern Iraq, sand storms also harm treasure from antiquity by increasing sand storm activity that erodes the ancient building remnants still in existence.
Salt in the soil can aid archaeologists in some circumstances, but the same mineral can also be destructive, and is destroying heritage sites, according to the geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri, who described salt as “aggressive … it will destroy the site – destroy the bricks, destroy the cuneiform tablets, destroy everything”.
The destructive power of salt is increasing as concentrations rise amid water shortages caused by dams built upstream by Turkey and Iran, and years of mismanagement of water resources and agriculture within Iraq.
“The salinity in Shatt al-Arab river started to increase from the 90s,” said Ahmad N A Hamdan, a civil engineer who studies the quality of the water in Iraq’s rivers. In his observations, the Shatt al-Arab – formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates - annually tests poor or very poor quality, especially in 2018, which he called a “crisis” year when brackish water sent at least 118,000 people to hospital in southern Basra province during a drought.
The climate crisis is adding to the problem. Iraq is getting hotter and dryer. The United Nations estimates that mean annual temperatures will rise by 2C by 2050 with more days of extreme temperatures of over 50C, while rainfall will drop by as much as 17% during the rainy season and the number of sand and dust storms will more than double from 120 per year to 300. Meanwhile, rising seawater is pushing a wedge of salt up into Iraq and in less than 30 years, parts of southern Iraq could be under water.
“Imagine the next 10 years, most of our sites will be under saline water,” said Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at Al-Qadisiyah University and co-director of the Iraqi-British Nahrein Network researching Iraqi heritage. He started to notice damage from salt at historic sites about a decade ago.
One spot suffering significant damage is Unesco-recognised Babylon, the capital of the Babylonian Empire, where a salty sheen coats 2,600-year-old mud bricks. In the Temple of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the base of the walls are crumbling. In the depths of the thick wall, salt accumulates until it crystallises, cracking the bricks and causing them to break apart.
Other sites that have been affected are Samarra, the Islamic-era capital with its spiral minaret that is being eroded by sandstorms, and Umm al-Aqarib with its White Temple, palace and cemetery that are being swallowed up by the desert.
The war-torn country has had a rainfall deficit, and Iraq has halved its cultivation of winter crops. According to Mena, by 2040, there will likely be no water flowing in their rivers. Severe droughts will affect the country by 2025, with deficits in potable water at 80%.
Last week, Minister of Water Resources Mahdi Rashid Al Hamdani predicted water shortages in the coming months, especially in the eastern province of Wasit.
Reports show that residents of several villages are preparing to move away from their ancestral lands because of the water scarcity and the unviability of the farms on which they depend.
The International Committee of the Red Cross writes about the marshlands that Saddam Hussein had drained to punish those that lived there. The consequences had also crippled the nation.
The Iraqi marshlands are a wetland with a unique ecosystem at the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.
In the early 1990s, these marshlands were intentionally dried up as a means of retaliation against a population considered to be rebellious.
By 2001, an estimated 90 per cent of the marshlands had disappeared (UNEP), leading to a loss of biodiversity and large-scale displacement.
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“There were more than 30 million palms before the Iran-Iraq war, today there’s less than half that number,” said Adel Al-Attar, an ICRC water and habitat advisor, from Basra.
“Conflict, neglect, soil salinity, there are several reasons that have contributed towards their loss. It is deeply upsetting. The whole atmosphere has changed since we lost the palms.
“They aren’t only about fruit. They give shade for certain crops. The leaves are used to make furniture like chairs and beds. No palms mean no business. So people have left the land and moved to the cities to find jobs.”
The loss of palms and the drying of the marshlands are visible reminders of the direct damage that war has inflicted upon the environment in southern Iraq.
Less visible, but arguably more detrimental, are the indirect consequences of war – whether in Iraq or anywhere else.
For example, conflict will often weaken a government’s ability to manage natural resources, the environment and infrastructure.
Remnants of war, such as unexploded weapons or anti-personnel mines, can render land unusable and harm wildlife, while camps for people uprooted by conflict place additional pressure on the surrounding environment.