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Groundwater Risk and Disaster Management
Published in Mohammad Karamouz, Azadeh Ahmadi, Masih Akhbari, Groundwater Hydrology, 2020
Mohammad Karamouz, Azadeh Ahmadi, Masih Akhbari
A qanat is a traditional delivery system with over 3000 years of history used to provide a reliable supply of water for irrigation in hot, arid, and semiarid climates The qanat system consists of underground channels that convey water from the groundwater aquifers in high lands to the surfaces at a lower level by gravity. Qanats are constructed as a series of wells connected by gently sloping tunnels. In qanat systems, a large quantity of water is delivered to the surface without the need for pumping. The water drains rely on gravity, with the destination lower than the source, which is typically an upland aquifer. Qanats allow water to be transported over long distances in hot dry climates without losing a large proportion of the water due to seepage or evaporation. Figure 10.17 shows a schematic cross section of a qanat.
Groundwater environments
Published in Ian Acworth, Investigating Groundwater, 2019
The afalaj systems were being constructed at the same time as the first dams. This suggests that Persia, Oman and Yemen may have been at the forefront of water harvesting developments in the world. Considerable understanding of groundwater occurrence is required in the construction of an falaj! Figure 1.3 shows a longitudinal schematic of a qanat (Amin and Salimi Manshadi, 1996). The tunnel systems were constructed into the alluvial fans spreading from the mouths of mountain wadis or from permanent sources of water, such as the lake formed in evaporites shown in Figure 1.4 where the start of the falaj can be seen in the far rock wall. At present there are approximately 300,000 km of qanats in Iran with some as deep as 400 m (Amin and Salimi Manshadi, 1996). The annual flow has been calculated as 7.5 Gm3.
Education Program for Drought
Published in Saeid Eslamian, Faezeh Eslamian, Handbook of Drought and Water Scarcity, 2017
Neda Torabi Farsani, Carlos Neto de Carvalho, Saeid Eslamian
The establishment of Sadabad Water Museum (Tehran) and the Water Museums in Isfahan and Yazd, Iran, constitute good examples. These museums exhibit water storage and include a lot of interesting information about the qanat water distribution system. Qanat is one of a series of well-like vertical shafts, connected by gently sloping tunnels. Qanats create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semiarid climates.
Probabilistic stability analysis of qanat tunnels in c-φ soil considering soil spatial variability
Published in European Journal of Environmental and Civil Engineering, 2022
Yanfei Zhang, Xianfeng Liu, Shengyang Yuan, Tingting Zhang, Jinyang Song, Weizhi Chen
A Qanat is an aqueduct that transports water from an aquifer or water well to the surface. This is an ancient water delivery system that allows water to be supplied over great distances in arid areas without losing much of the water. It was built in Iran, Iraq, and several other regions. The qanats are made up of a succession of vertical shafts that are joined by a gradually sloping tunnel. With the development of transportation infrastructure, the new roads or railways are inevitably built in areas where qanats are widely distributed. Their construction may affect the stability of existing qanat tunnels (Singh, 2019). Taking Iran as an example, a high-speed railway from Tehran to Isfahan is recently being constructed under the Belt and Road Initiative program (Chen et al., 2022), a detailed site investigation shows that substantial existing qanats crosses or approaches to the railway line, which may potentially influence the stability of the upper high-speed railway subgrade. However, to the authors’ knowledge, few studies are so far available in the literature investigating the stability of qanat tunnels upon external embankment loadings.
The shifted ownership regime of a common-pool resource: the case of water exploitation in Sanandaj County, Iran
Published in Water International, 2020
Nishtman Karimi, Kobe Boussauw, Farzad Karimi
For many centuries, the local community of the central arid plain of Iran has developed traditional ecological knowledge about how to manage scarce water resources, through interpretation of ecological signals for learning and adapting (Berkes et al., 2000). This knowledge was manifested in the construction of elements of technical infrastructure, the qanats. Qanats were hand-dug underground tunnels developed to store runoff water and to gravitationally redirect groundwater over long distances and to the surface (Ahmadi et al., 2010; Amin et al., 1983). The system supported both irrigation and domestic use of water in rural and urban areas during dry seasons by storing and minimizing evaporation during transportation. The water supply was relatively stable since only annual surplus groundwater was discharged from aquifers (Boustani, 2008; Kordovani, 2015; Madani, 2014). An essential component of the knowledge and practices was a particular worldview or ‘cosmovision’ that considered the folk as a part of the ecosystem, which created the cultural values and the basic norms and rules in each community (Berkes et al., 2000) (Figures 3 and 4).