the Bengal Water Machine

Popular Science headline: Farmers accidentally created a flood-resistant ‘machine’ across Bangladesh

Sub-headline: Pumping water in the dry months makes the ground sponge-like for the wet season, a system called the Bengal Water Machine.

BY RAHUL RAO | PUBLISHED SEP 15, 2022 2:00 PM

https://www.popsci.com/environment/bangladesh-farmers-season…

To control unpredictable water and stop floods, you might build a dam. To build a dam, you generally need hills and dales—geographic features to hold water in a reservoir. Which is why dams don’t fare well in Bangladesh, most of which is a flat floodplain that’s just a few feet above sea level.

Instead, in a happy accident, millions of Bangladeshi farmers have managed to create a flood control system of their very own, taking advantage of the region’s wet-and-dry seasonal climate. As farmers pump water from the ground in the dry season, they free up space for water to flood in during the wet season, hydrogeologists found.

Researchers published the system they’d uncovered in the journal Science on September 15. And authorities could use the findings to make farming more sustainable, writes Aditi Mukherji, a researcher in Delhi for the International Water Management Institute who wasn’t involved in the paper, in a companion article in Science.

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