Random Oasis Name Generator

How this random oasis generator works

Press Generate and you get an oasis. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Siwa. Bahariya. Kharga. Figuig. Huacachina. Liwa. Tafilalt. Al-Ahsa.

Every one of them is drinking water that fell as rain before anybody had invented writing, and one of the most famous oases in the literature has never been found by anybody.

An oasis is not a puddle. It is the top of an aquifer.

The cartoon version is a pool of water in the sand, and it is wrong in a way that matters.

Almost every real oasis sits in a depression. Not because water collects in low ground from above, since in the deep desert there is no rain to collect, but because a low place cuts down into the water table. The groundwater is there all along, saturating the rock, sitting at a level. Dig down to it, or let the land fall to it, and it appears.

Siwa, in Egypt's Western Desert, lies in a depression below sea level. It has around two hundred natural springs, of which some eighty are still used for drinking or irrigation, and which are known locally as the Roman eyes. The land did not rise to meet the water. The land went down.

The rest is engineering, some of it thousands of years old. Where the water table sits just below reach, desert peoples dug gently sloping tunnels into the hillside to let gravity walk the groundwater out to daylight. In Iran they are called qanats. They are among the oldest working infrastructure on Earth.

An oasis is therefore not a place where water arrives. It is a place where the desert is thin enough to see through.

The water is older than farming

The Sahara has not always been a desert. Rain fell on it in quantity, and that rain soaked down into vast beds of porous sandstone and stayed there. Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad sit on top of one of the largest of these, the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System.

That water is called fossil water. It accumulated when the climate was wetter, over timescales measured in thousands to millions of years, and in the present climate it is not meaningfully replaced. Nothing is recharging it. There is a fixed quantity and it is going out.

So when you stand at an oasis and drink, you are drinking rain that fell before the pyramids, before writing, before anybody in that landscape had planted anything on purpose. The palm trees are running on a battery that is not being recharged.

Every date grown at a Saharan oasis is, in the strictest sense, a mining operation.

What happens when you pump it too fast

Siwa is the cautionary tale, and it is not the one you would guess. The oasis is not drying out. It is drowning.

Decades of uncontrolled drilling to expand farming put more than twelve hundred wells into the shallow limestone aquifer alone. Far more water came up than the land could use, drainage was poor, and the excess had nowhere to go. So it pooled. The water table rose, and salt lakes spread across the floor of the depression.

Then the salt came for the farms. The shallow limestone aquifer is brackish, running up to 8,000 milligrams of dissolved solids per litre. The deep Nubian sandstone beneath it is fresh, under 260. That is a factor of thirty between the water you want and the water that is easy to reach, and irrigation water evaporating in the sun leaves its dissolved salts behind in the soil.

An oasis destroyed by too much water. That is what happens when you treat a battery like a tap.

Zerzura, the oasis nobody has ever found

Zerzura is a legend. A white city, or an oasis of palms with a sleeping king and queen, said to lie somewhere in the Sahara west of the Nile. It appears in a fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript, a treasure hunter's guide called the Kitab al-Kanuz.

People went looking. In 1930 the searchers came back out of the desert, sat down in a bar in Wadi Halfa, and founded the Zerzura Club. Ralph Bagnold was there. So was the Hungarian aviator László Almásy, who spent years crossing the Libyan Desert by car and by aeroplane.

They found other things. Almásy and Patrick Clayton flew over the Gilf Kebir in 1932 and spotted two valleys nobody had mapped, with prehistoric rock art in them. The club mapped enormous stretches of unknown desert. Bagnold's work on how wind moves sand became a founding text of a whole science.

They never found Zerzura. Bagnold's own conclusion was that it was a legend that could never be solved by discovery, which is a polite way of saying it is not there.

And there is a final twist. The earliest known mention of the name is not in a book of legends at all. It is in a thirteenth-century tax register of the Fayyum, listing villages that had been abandoned. Zarzura was a place somebody had stopped paying tax on, two centuries before it became a city of gold.

A dead village became a legend. Then men in aeroplanes spent a decade flying over the emptiest place on Earth looking for it, and mapped the desert instead.

Ways people actually use this

• Worldbuilding. An oasis is a chokepoint. Whoever holds it holds the road, and every caravan route in history is a line drawn between them.
• Quizzes. Show the oasis, ask for the country. Then ask where the water came from, and when it fell.
• Naming things. Siwa, Terjit, Ubari and Tighmert are all beautiful and none of them is taken.
• Travel reading. Huacachina in Peru is a lagoon surrounded by dunes, and it is sinking as the groundwater is pumped.
• Teaching scepticism. Ask a class which famous oasis of the Libyan Desert has never been found. Nobody ever guesses.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type Ain into Contains, then Ein. Both transliterate the same Semitic word for a spring, literally an eye. Ain Sefra, Ein Gedi, Ain Aswan.
• Type Wadi. A wadi is a dry riverbed that runs only after rain, which is a completely different way for water to arrive.
• Type Al and you get more than the names beginning with the Arabic article, because Contains matches anywhere and catches the "al" buried inside other words. Filters are literal. They do not know what a prefix is.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character, so give them one letter, not a word.

Questions people ask

What is an oasis?

A place in a desert where groundwater reaches the surface or comes close enough to be reached, usually in a depression that cuts down into the water table. It is fed from below, not from above.

What is fossil water?

Groundwater that accumulated during a wetter climate thousands or millions of years ago and is not being replenished under present conditions. Most Saharan oases run on it. It is a finite stock, not a renewable flow.

Is Zerzura a real place?

No. It is a legendary oasis of the Libyan Desert, described in a fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript and searched for repeatedly through the twentieth century, most famously by László Almásy and the Zerzura Club. It has never been found. Ralph Bagnold concluded it never would be.

Why is Siwa Oasis getting saltier?

Because decades of heavy pumping brought up more water than the land could use, the water table rose, and the excess formed salt lakes. Evaporating irrigation water leaves its dissolved salts behind in the soil, and most private wells now draw brackish water from the shallow aquifer.

What is the largest oasis in the world?

Al-Ahsa in Saudi Arabia is usually given the title. Like every superlative in geography, it depends on whether you are measuring the water, the palms, or the people.

References

1. Zerzura
2. Exploration mysteries, Zerzura
3. Groundwater and salinity in Siwa Oasis
4. Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, water quality assessment