Cyrenaica

Orbit 35704 Frame 2974 17 February 2002 9:15 GMT

Part of Cyrenaica (''Barqah'' in Arabic), Northeastern Libya.
This region consists mainly of a Tertiary limestone plateau, the Jebel el Akhdar, (to the right), that slopes seaward in a series of terraces.
Numerous oases and fertile soils are spread all around.

To the left: sandy coastal plains face the Gulf of Sirte, a late Mesozoic to Cenozoic extensional basin that was initiated in the late Jurassic.
Most attention of the oil industry has been directed to the prolific Sirte Basin, but acreage is still available in the less intensively explored Cyrenaica region. Here, over 70 wells have been drilled, primarily in the sixties, but a better understanding of the geological and tectonic evolution, supported also by space observation techniques, will probably lead to more and larger oil and gas discoveries.

Click on the thumbnail image to see a higher resolution version of this image; a very high resolution image, 1972 x 2021 pixels, 1716903 bytes, is also available.

Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry