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Rare Sahara Floods Bring Morocco’s Dried-Up South Back To Life
Locals said the basin had been barren for nearly 20 years.
In Morocco’s southeastern desert, a rare downpour has brought lakes and ponds back to life, with locals — and tourists — hailing it as a gift from the heavens.
In Merzouga, an attractive tourist town some 600 kilometres (370 miles) southeast of the capital Rabat, the once-parched golden dunes are now dotted with replenished ponds and lakes.
A man sits next to his camels on the shores of Yasmina lake, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
“We’re incredibly happy about the recent rains,” said Youssef Ait Chiga, a local tour guide leading a group of German tourists to Yasmina Lake nestled amidst Merzouga’s dunes.
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Khalid Skandouli, another tour guide, said the rain has drawn even more visitors to the tourist area, now particularly eager to witness this odd transformation.
Tourists camp on the shores of Erg Znaigui, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
With him, Laetitia Chevallier, a French tourist and regular visitor to the region, said the rainfall has proved a “blessing from the sky”.
“The desert became green again, the animals have food again, and the plants and palm trees came back to life,” she said.
Locals told AFP the basin had been barren for nearly 20 years.
A man leads his camels along the shores of Yasmina lake, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
Last year was Morocco’s driest in 80 years, with a 48 percent drop in rainfall, according to an October report from the General Directorate of Meteorology (DGM).
But in September, torrential rains triggered floods in southern parts of Morocco, killing at least 28 people, according to authorities.
The rare heavy rains come as the North African kingdom grapples with its worst drought in nearly 40 years, threatening its economically crucial agriculture sector.
Neighbouring Algeria saw similar rain and flooding in early September, killing six people.
North African countries currently rank among the world’s most water-stressed, according to the World Resources Institute, a non-profit research organisation.
The kingdom’s meteorological agency described the recent massive rainfall as “exceptional”.
It attributed it to an unusual shift of the intertropical convergence zone — the equatorial region where winds from the northern and southern hemispheres meet, causing thunderstorms and heavy rainfall.
‘Climate change’
“Everything suggests that this is a sign of climate change,” Fatima Driouech, a Moroccan climate scientist, told AFP. “But it’s too early to say definitively without thorough studies.”
Driouech emphasised the importance of further research to attribute this event to broader climate trends.
Experts say climate change is making extreme weather events, such as storms and droughts, more frequent and intense.
In Morocco’s south, the rains have helped partially fill some reservoirs and replenish groundwater aquifers.
But for those levels to significantly rise, experts say the rains would need to continue over a longer period of time.
The rest of the country is still grappling with drought, now in its sixth consecutive year, jeopardising the agricultural sector that employs over a third of Morocco’s workforce.
Jean Marc Berhocoirigoin, a 68-year-old French tourist, said he was surprised to find Yasmina Lake replenished.
“I felt like a kid on Christmas morning,” he said. “I hadn’t seen these views for 15 years.”
Water has also returned to other desert areas such as Erg Znaigui, about 40 kilometres south of Merzouga, AFP reporters saw.
While the rains have breathed life into Morocco’s arid southeast, Driouech warns that “a single extreme event can’t bring lasting change”.
But last week, Morocco’s meteorological agency said such downpours could become increasingly frequent, “driven partly by climate change as the intertropical convergence zone shifts further north”.
- A cleaning company director introduced an AI tool to help write work emails
- Employees used the tool to try and shorten customer response time
A Melbourne cleaning company director has lost out on thousands of dollars after using artificial intelligence to help write a series of emails.
The business boss had hoped to improve his firm’s productivity, but one mistake alone cost it more than $2000 when he failed to pick up on the blunder.
End of Lease Cleaning Melbourne director Michael had introduced a generative AI tool to speed up the time it would take for his team to respond to customer emails.
Rather than have employees type out individual lists of cleaning services, they would input information such as the type of service required and let the tool do the rest.
The AI-powered tool would then generate an email that included the services, their costs and a job quote for each customer.
But the tool produced several emails with mistakes which were not picked up by the cleaning company’s employees.
‘We lost quite a lot of money,’ Michael told 9news.au.
The AI tool mistakenly listed different services to the ones required without changing the quotes to reflect the higher prices.
A cleaning company director lost out on over $2,000 after an AI tool to write emails (stock)
Michael and his team were forced to provide full wall cleans, priced between $500 to $700 for the price of a spot wall clean which is significantly lower.
The company’s most-costly mistake involved the director using the AI tool to generate a quote for property that required a deep clean worth around $2,000.
Michael read over the generated email but failed to spot several mistakes within the correspondence.
He didn’t spot the errors until a week later, by which time it was too late to correct them as the customer had signed up to a different company.
After the $2,000 mistake, End of Lease Cleaning Melbourne’s employees no longer use AI for business correspondence.
The response time for returning customers’ emails has now returned to five hours, the time it had previously taken prior to introducing the AI tool.
‘If you are using AI, you definitely need to read everything two to three times before you send that email,’ he added.
Almost half of all Australians use generative AI, according to a survey Google conducted with IPSOS in January.
According to a survey, around 65 percent of Australian workers said their employer had introduced AI in the workplace (stock)
Out of that 50 percent, almost 75 percent of those report using it for work.
In a separate survey carried out by HR platform Workday, around 65 percent of Australian workers stated their employer had introduced AI in the workplace.
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