Last updated Heavily laden 30 cwt 1533x2 Chevrolets of R1 Patrol of the Long Range Desert Group setting out from Jalo oasis. In the foreground is "R4" Rotowaro W.D.no. L4618912.
Jalo Oasis (or Jalu, or Gialo) is an oasis in Cyrenaica, Libya, located west of the Great Sand Sea and about 250km south-east of the Gulf of Sidra. Quite large, 19 kilometres (12mi) long and up to 11 kilometres (7mi) wide,[1] it supports a number of settlements, the largest of which is the town of Jalu. Jalu was the administrative capital of the Jalu District from 1983 to 1988, at which time the area became part of the Ajdabiya District and as of 2007 is now part of the Al Wahat District.
Jalu, Jaloo, or Gialo is a town in the Al Wahat District in northeastern Libya in the Jalo oasis. From 2001 to 2007 it was part of Ajdabiya District. Formerly (1983-1987) it was the administrative seat of Jalu District (baladiyah).
In geography, an oasis is the combination of a human settlement and a cultivated area in a desert or semi-desert environment. Oases also provide habitat for animals and spontaneous plants.
Cyrenaica is the eastern coastal region of Libya. Also known as Pentapolis in antiquity, it formed part of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica, later divided into Libya Pentapolis and Libya Sicca. During the Islamic period, the area came to be known as Barqa, after the city of Barca.
Because of its location and as a source of water, it had strategic importance during the North African Campaign in World War II and changed hands several times between Allied and Axis forces.[2]
The North African Campaign of the Second World War took place in North Africa from 10 June 1940 to 13 May 1943. It included campaigns fought in the Libyan and Egyptian deserts and in Morocco and Algeria, as well as Tunisia.
World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.
The water at the Jalo oasis is quite salty (3,880 parts per million).[3] The water is an alkaline with a pH of 7.4 and is very hard with numerous dissolved salts in addition to sodium chloride.[3]
Salinity is the saltiness or amount of salt dissolved in a body of water, called saline water. This is usually measured in . Salinity is an important factor in determining many aspects of the chemistry of natural waters and of biological processes within it, and is a thermodynamic state variable that, along with temperature and pressure, governs physical characteristics like the density and heat capacity of the water.
Alkalinity is the capacity of water to resist changes in pH that would make the water more acidic. Alkalinity is the strength of a buffer solution composed of weak acids and their conjugate bases. It is measured by titrating the solution with a monoprotic acid such as HCl until its pH changes abruptly, or it reaches a known endpoint where that happens. Alkalinity is expressed in units of meq/L, which corresponds to the amount of monoprotic acid added as a titrant in millimoles per liter.
In chemistry, pH is a scale used to specify how acidic or basic a water-based solution is. Acidic solutions have a lower pH, while basic solutions have a higher pH. At room temperature (25 °C), pure water is neither acidic nor basic and has a pH of 7.
Communities
In addition to Jalu, the oasis supports the following communities:[4]
↑ Reclus, Elisee (1888) Africa: History, Geography, and People: Volume II North-West Africa Appleton, New York, page 25, OCLC9821556
↑ Molinari, Andrea (2006) Desert Raiders: Axis and Allied Special Forces 1940-43 Osprey, Oxford, England, page 74, ISBN978-1-84603-006-2
1 2 Walton, Kenneth (2007) The Arid Zones AldineTransaction, New Brunswick, New Jersey, page 109, ISBN978-0-202-30928-6; originally published by Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, in 1969, OCLC44718
Hassanein, Ahmed Mohammed (1925) The Lost Oasis Butterworth, London OCLC5663666
Walton, Kenneth (1952) "The Aberdeen University Expedition to Cyrenaica, 1951: Part 2: The oasis of Jalo" Scottish Geographical Magazine 68(3):pp.110–119
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated d/b/a OCLC is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog (OPAC) in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services. OCLC also maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.
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