A huge reserve of fresh water has been discovered hidden beneath Sicily’s Iblei Mountains

 A huge reserve of fresh water has been discovered hidden beneath Sicily’s Iblei Mountains.

The vast freshwater reserve is believed to contain around 17 billion cubic metres of water and is between 700 and 2,500 metres below the surface. It could hold the key to solving Sicily’s ongoing drought, one of the worst in Europe.

“It’s a very important study which could be fundamental to solving a problem that is putting Sicily in serious difficulty,” says Professor Lorenzo Lipparini, researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV). “According to our calculations, there could be an important reserve even below sea level.”

It was discovered by a team of researchers from the INGV and the Universities of Malta and Rome Tre who published their research in November. Though it’s believed that traces of the water were first discovered in the early 2000s when oil company Maurel et Prom was searching the area for natural gas.

Now a politician for Ragusa province, where some of the water is, has appealed to the regional government to make the most of this resource.

“Last November we did not yet know that during the winter we were preparing to face it would not rain enough to avoid the serious drought that we are now seeing and, in light of how things went, the discovery of the two universities could be decisive in addressing this crisis with concrete actions,” Nello Dipasquale’s question reads.

“I asked the regional government whether or not they intend to start a project that could connect this water reserve to the network and use it in the most critical moments, just like the one we are experiencing.”