Bahrain has grown a lot and is still growing: NASA
Bahrain has grown and is growing further – both in terms of population and land area, the latest report by NASA’s earth observatory said. National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA also released two areal images of Bahrain — taken in a gap of 35 years — to support their claims.
The first image is from Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 on 17th August 1987. The second image, captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, shows the same area on 17th August 2022. The first image comes soon after Bahrain got linked to Saudi Arabia via the King Fahd causeway in 1986. Comparing both images, NASA points out that the “change is most apparent in the country’s north, where shallow coastal waters have made it technically and economically feasible to build new land from the seafloor.”
NASA tells this based on a report by Sabah Aljenaid, geographic information systems and remote sensing scientist at Arabian Gulf University, who used Landsat images to classify changes to the land between 1986 and 2020. Aljenaid and colleagues found that built-up (urban) areas dominated the changes during this period, increasing on average by 7.5% each year.
The growth came primarily at the expense of vegetated land and wetlands. Aljenaid also highlights the dramatic expansion of Muharraq Island, which now spans more than 60 square kilometres (23 square miles) northeast of Manama, the capital city. She also pointed to changes on the island of Nabih Saleh. While the focus of urban expansion is in the north, parts of the southern coastline had undergone a change too, the report adds.
Dredging for the artificial islands of Durrat Al Bahrain, which began in 2004, added about 5 square kilometres (2 square miles) of land to the southeast coast by 2007. The report, quoting John Burt, a marine biologist at New York University Abu Dhabi, said: “A decade ago, I wrote that 11% of the island of Bahrain is reclaimed land, and the growth continues today.” He further points out that the shape of Bahrain in 35 more years remains to be seen.
“There was on-and-off talk of building a bridge across Fasht Al Adhm to Qatar,” Burt said. “It has not come to fruition, but it may be a future mega-development to watch out for.” Citing new reports, NASA also shows that in July 2022, a record 2.5 million motor vehicle passengers travelled on the 25-kilometre (16-mile) stretch of road. What fuels this growth? According to Eman Ghoneim, a physical geographer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, the rapid population growth and the simultaneous increase in urbanization, along with land scarcity, have pushed Bahrain to invest in mega land reclamation projects to extend its coastline.
