Malta's underground water world

Abstract

On the Maltese islands, in short Malta, situated as they are in the middle of the Mediterranean with plenty of sunshine but little rain, and no mountains, lakes or Rivers, water supply has always been a problem for their inhabitants. Today, Malta obtains more than half of its water by desalinating sea water. First tried at the beginning of the twentieth century with limited success, it was resorted to on a large scale in the 1960s with distillation and later in the 1980s with Reverse Osmosis, a technology still in use today.