A joint Russian-Omani paper was published in Journal of Hydrology. In the 1950s, Russian academician Vladimir Kunin, one of the founders of the Institute of Water Problems in Moscow and the Institute of Deserts in Ashkhabad, discovered and described fresh water lenses in the Karakum desert of Turkmenistan. These lenses float on the top of saline and hypersaline groundwater. The genesis of these lenses and factors controlling fresh water storage, circulation in the lenses, and their resilience to adverse climatic factors and anthropogenic impacts (pumping) were not clear.
* This article was originally published here
