A new humanitarian mission called “1,000 Wells for Darfur” grew out of the discovery from recent space data of an ancient megalake in a large basin in that region. Eman Ghoneim, a research professor at Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, and Center director Farouk El-Baz mapped the ancient lake's boundary using Landsat, RADARSAT, and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data.

The newly mapped lake once occupied 30,750 square kilometers and would have contained approximately 2530 cubic kilometers of water when full during historically humid climate phases.