Hydraulic engineering

One of sub-disciplines of civil engineering is hydraulic engineering, which is concerned with the flow and conveyance of fluids, principally water and sewage. This area of civil engineering is related to the design of bridges, dams, channels, canals.

Agriculture gave rise to hydraulic engineering. Agricultural land may include some farmland and wasteland. Farmland is a land used for agricultural work concerned with cultivating, raising crops, and feeding and raising livestock. Wasteland is a land which is barren and uninhabited. But today, the wasteland is converted into the useful land in different ways such as converting into a park, doing agricultural, growing plants. One of the oldest and simplest ways to restore exhausted farmland is to leave it fallow or to make reclamation.

Egypt's Nile Basin is a modern example of river control and irrigation on the grand scale. For millennia, much of Egypt's food has been cultivated in the Nile delta region. The Egyptians evolved the technique of basin irrigation, which means trapping part of the annual floodwaters within low earth embankments built beside the river. The Nile usually overflowed at the right time of year for planting crops. Ancient Egyptians use this to increase the amount of land they could use for crops and support a thriving population.

As you can see, water and water resources are very important for maintaining an adequate food supply and a productive environment for the all living organisms. The water cycle is the path that all water follows as it moves around Earth in different states: falling as rain, it flows to the sea, then returns to the clouds, in an endless cycle. But its distribution on the earth varies enormously, and in general there is either too little or too much of it. Some places have to be irrigated. Where there is too much water, the land must be drained. The engineer must alter and regulate great rivers, raise embankment, dams, and barrages, construct aqueducts and sluices, build vast reservoirs to solve this problem.

In regions where water shortage is associated with socio-economic factors, risks can be reduced if water resources are effectively managed. An example is the systems of Singapore's "Four Cranes" - systems of sustainable collection and distribution of water. Singapore uses water from four sources: imported, salt-free sea water, purified water and rainwater collected on the territory of the city. So, countries with the lack of the water, such as India, could focus on similar examples to solve their problems.

To sum up, water is the basic necessity for the functioning of all life forms that exist on earth. It is safe to say that water is the reason behind earth being the only planet to support life.

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