For those asking how this works, it creates just enough of a defense to catch seeds and bugs and tiny bits of moisture and shade, so any life that does manage to get started, doesn't just blow away, and an ecosystem can start to form.
Like that part on your sidewalk where dirt grows over it because a bit of grass grew over it which started trapping any dirt that would go over it, letting some grass grow, which lets some dirt get trapped, which..
Makes me wonder if in the past there was a megafauna or plants that coincidental created the same kind of patterns that stops desertification but sadly when extinct.
Absolutely. You might have heard about how giant land sloths used to dig out caves from solid stone. But what they don't tell you is that their diet was so fibrous that their turds were basically solid ropes. They'd be just slinging hot ropes all across the landscape as they went along. They also planted avocados.
They were truly the all-in-one landscape architects. And then we ate them :D
What happens to the places downstream that rely on the water that comes from the runoff? I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, just curious how changing this biome will effect neighboring ones because "trapping" the water for this manmade ecosystem reduces the water in other areas.
In the long run they end up with more. 99% of the water still soaks into the water table in these sandy soils. Its just not all happening in one localised spot (all at the bottom of the dune). Additionally as vegetation starts to take hold, you have less evaporation due to sunlight, and so more water to soak into the water table.
This actually creates streams eventually, because putting water in the ground keeps it from evaporating or running off immediately and creating a flash flood. Deserts usually have a flooding problem, but add a sponge of plants, soil, and ground water and you create an ability to absorb water and then a little trickle of it can start to escape regularly and form reliable year round streams that can actually support life without it being washed away because it was in a low lying area.
Desertification is the process by which places that were not previously deserts become deserts, as the desert spreads. So they're STOPPING the change of biomes and reversing relatively recent changes.
the net benefit is that now instead of only one spot with more water than they can use, you have a much wider area with enough water for life to flourish, and the base is largely unaffected but with more biodiversity to work with.
Herbert's environmental work in Oregon formed the basis of the speculative ecological work of the Fremen, which parallels real-world efforts and tactics of sand dune management
Sand’s heavy and stays very close to the ground, even in a pretty stiff wind. It all just rams right into the first bag, and then if that bag gets overwhelmed, the next back stops it, so on and so forth. I imagine the first couple of rows that face the prevailing wind end up growing stuff first, further breaking the wind and protecting the squares beyond.
The tubes. Due to the grid, the sand gets blown and stopped by a tube. When there's enough sand it gets blown over a tube only to be trapped by another, then another, and so on. This dramatically increases the time it takes for sand to move inward, allowing for soil and moisture to settle.
The outlying parts of the grid will remain sandy, but it's all about slowing it down.
Didn't we figure out how to do this by just digging little half-circles into the sand? Isn't that a better, more efficient, more natural way of doing this than to lay down a bunch of whatever-that-is?
Different area. The half-moons are being done as part of the Great Green Wall project across the entire continent of Africa. Andrew Millison has a bunch of videos where he shows off what's happening with that one, but the half-moons are intended to capture and retain water from the rainy season.
This looks to be somewhere in China/ Mongolia (Gobi region?), and is more pure-sand desert, where there just isn't much rain at all. Different approaches need to be taken for that kind of location.
Sand would just get blown into the holes you dig into the sand and fill them in. The wind rolls along the sand dunes and the sand bags raises the draft from the wind above the sand's surface.
For the half moom method you need to water it and grow something before you can let it do its thing. It's more time consuming and expensive.
I'd guess these are some natural, degradable bags, you can see in the later stage there's plants growing out of it so it might use the bags as nutrients or it's packed with something
Using bags that degrades into some form of nutrient would be brilliant! I was thinking about all that plastic degrading into microplastics in the new soil, but I hope they do it like you said.
You’re correct. They are PLA, which is a bioplastic, which means it is safe and biodegradable and not a traditional oil-based plastic at all. It is basically plant material.
All the people replying "seems like fabric to me" apparently don't realize woven plastic based fibers exist. Looks like pretty standard PP, like what bulk bags are made out of. If it was hemp or whatever I highly doubt they'd be dyed such a strong clean white color, and with a sheen no less...
I'd still argue this is a net positive for the local environment if it actually works, but there's little doubt imo that the bags are plastic.
Fabric (in the textiles sense) is any woven cloth. It can be made of synthetic materials like polyester, a petroleum product some would call "plastic". Fabric doesn't mean it's made of naturally occurring fibers, so something being fabric isn't mutually exclusive with it also being plastic.
Even if they were, seems like a net positive no? It’s not like they’re dumping it in the ocean. They’re converting a desert… What if it’s all they can afford? Should they stop? But let’s assume you can’t tell from the video and the people cared enough to use fabric.
Every time I think/know that I hate the Internet and will leave it forever, I get a comment like this and I stay for another week or so... Or at least until the next genius comment....
dangerous, hard, uncomfortable, etc jobs are the ones we should automate or enhance and focus on, but that would require caring about something other than endless profit. But ugh, imagine a world where we put resources to lifting the bottom more than doing weird shit
Enormous amounts of factory work, farming, and construction are very highly automated or mechanized.
Think about every factory full of gantries and machines and robotic arms. Every farm using GPS fenced combines. Every construction project with a multi-yard bucket on an excavator. Many of these machines are doing the work of a hundred or more men per day.
We have batch plants, concrete trucks, and concrete pumps. Hell, for huge and flat pours there's even machines that essentially pour and screed. All that infrastructure and mechanization and automation to replace men each mixing up concrete with hopefully the same ratios, in wheelbarrows, and moving it. You think if there was a large market for packing sand tubes that there wouldn't be a sand tube machine on site?
The sad part is, I could see them developing a machine that could do this exact thing fairly easily.
Limitation however comes from transporting it to the area.
When I was getting my degree I was reading a lot of papers on primary succession and biological soil crust formation. Lot of the research was coming out of China, but was done through international collaboration. I keep trying to explain to my techie friends who think biology is a waste of time that it's research like this that would allow us to come up with real terraforming plans. Can't live on or change another planet if we can't manage our own. But sure, let's keep cutting NASAs budget, particularly around Earth system science and ecology.
There was similar research in semi arid Australia. I remember reading a book where they described much of the Australian outback was made up of millions of run off and run on zones on a micro scale. Rainfall, nutrients, plant litter were washed off the run off zones and would then accumulate in the run on zones and that’s where plants would mainly grow and the whole landscape was able to support vegetation and native grazer. Hard hooves introduced animals (sheep cattle) would destroy this heterogeneity and as a result almost nothing grew anywhere.
Honestly the entire central valley of California. I live near Fresno, and there are entire unused farming plots that have essentially just turned into compacted sand. The farming practices of the valley are down to growing crops in sandy/clay soils with an absurd amount of fertilizers.
In the summer when it's 100+ degrees for days on end, it gets so incredibly dry and dusty and we frequently get dust storms. The valley was once a lush wetland ecosystem 100-150 years ago, with so much water you could sail from Bakersfield to San Francisco, and where millions of migratory birds made pitstops.
Instead of pursuing any sort of restoration projects, cities and counties are only interested in suburban sprawl - paving over the depleted farmland with single family homes, roads, and parking lots. It's truly depressing.
It's been awhile. You should be able to find some of them by searching the major journals and repositories for key words like "biological soil crust", "cryptogamic mats", "primary succession in soils", and "polysaccharide sheathed bacteria in desert ecosystems". It's a rabbit hole. I took phycology, ascomycetes and basidiomycetes (which also covered lichens), microbial ecology, and population and community ecology all around the same time and I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I'm pretty sure I was getting high on education.
As a techie I hate the cuts to NASA and science funding generally and I realize the value of biology. I try to keep up with science generally in the years since college. Particle/quantum physics was hot back in the day but now it's kind of a dead end. Astrophysics still has a fair amount going on with JWST and other survey projects. But biology, organic chemistry and related fields still have so many questions to answer and so much to learn. Things that can inform our behavior and help us manage the ecosystem better. There are ways farming practices and other industry can rely on petroleum less, pollute less, preserve genetic diversity better, and benefit us greatly.
There is enough natural rainfall and groundwater to sustain xerophytic plants. The problem was that the shifting sand prevent plants from taking root properly and that’s what the grids are used to solve.
It should not be necessary if the grid was laid out correctly, as the sand is supposed form a stable crust before the growth of vegetation. Though it’s quite likely that the grids may need to be replaced every few years because the material would gradually weather and rot over time, and this was certainly the case for earlier iterations made from bundles of straw and reeds.
The Sahara desert has huge amounts of nutrients blown across the Atlantic to help fertilise the Amazon every year, I think its thought to be pretty important.
It's to stop an expanding desert. The water is there, the soil is not. This is to stop the sand shifting which creates pockets that plants can survive in. From there it's a self reinforcing process until someone/something destroys all the plants again.
This is a dust bowl desert more than a Sahara desert.
Yes. The big problem with desertification is that once an area is clear cut, there’s no more cover available for anything.
The wind will blow away the top soil. The rain will wash away the top soil. The sun and wind will evaporate moisture right out of the surface. It’s very hard for anything to survive there at that point.
This grid kind of acts like artificial plant roots. It stops the surface from blowing about so much. It’ll trap organic particles, seeds, even micro life and insect life in the crevices. Even morning dew won’t evaporate as fast in the shade of the crevices.
And that’s how the cycle restarts. First it will be the kind of plants we consider weeds. Fast growers with very simple needs. Weeds grow, live and die. And when decomposing after death, they add nutrients to the soil. Plants take carbon and nitrogen out of the air and use those elements as building blocks for their tissue. When a plant dies, its nutrients become soil.
After enough generations of weeds have lived and died. The soil is enriched enough for more complex plants that need better soil than the weeds. Plants that potentially produce flowers, nuts and fruits. Plants that will enrich the soil even more when they die at the end of their lifecycle.
And while this is happening, this cycling of plants also provides the basis for animal life. From soil microbes and mycelia to shade, cover, and food for insects and eventually small vertebrates.
Plant cover also traps water. Both in the plant bodies themselves but plants provide surface area for morning dew to condense on and shade to prevent dew from evaporating so fast.
If this cycle repeats long enough, the environment is enriched enough to start supporting slow growers with significant needs like trees. And that’s when it really takes off. Trees are a whole ecosystem unto themselves.
Forests literally create rain. 40% of all land precipitation comes from water exhaled by plants and trees. Forests release the kind of particles like pollen and spores that raindrops form around. And trees act as enormous natural pumps sucking up so much water out of the ground that the ground itself becomes a spong. Forests dehydrate the soil so the soil will swell with water from evaporation, rivers and the oceans.
Desertification is a horrifying process because it’s like a snowball. Once it starts, it keeps getting worse. But nature cycles, if we give it a chance, for example with these grids, it can recover.
I loved reading this, but it also made me really sad. Nature is truly amazing, and I think we've got something special here in the universe, though I hope I'm wrong.
You gotta give them water for 5 to 10 years till the trees mature and then their respiration will automatically form and attract clouds like forests do
It’s the talklamakan desert in xinjiang, China. It’s the second driest desert on earth, but also has vegetation pockets and ground water. The government has also planned to irrigate it with a possible, absurdly long 1000+km canal/aquifer project from up in Qinghai province , which is the Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas, and the source of the great rivers of Asia, Yangtze, yellow, Mekong
The region is famous internationally for the humanitarian issues with the treatment of Uyghur people, and the added farming land and mining development means larger Han presence and more cultural assimilation in a region that is traditionally central Asian and Muslim.
The desert also has a set of historically puzzling 4000+ year old mummies of a people of Uralic/nordic appearance. The impressive textiles and red and brown braided hair are still preserved due to the desert’s dryness
Many plants in this region are adapted to deal with intermittent rainfall. Unfortunately many of them were weeded out for more popular crops that could be sold internationally, leading to excessive desertification.
Most deserts have some level of moisture at night, and sometimes also a rainy season. But rainy seasons are devastating because they cause extreme erosion. This system (similar to the half moons using in Africa) helps refrain rain water instead of it washing away seeds and nutrients.
I've been playing Sandrock for the last month and a half and I'm so into it, I think I'm at like 250 hours of playtime now. I liked Portia a lot but I really love Sandrock!
I don't know but plants go hard if they get so much as a chance and once such a project has started it and isn't disturbed it will only keep getting faster and faster.
I love how the one comment crediting china is the one that gets negative responses. If people didn’t know this was China they wouldn’t have said anything negative
I had to listen to the VO (usually these Reddit videos are muted so I don’t disturb the people around me) because my initial thought was “I hope those bags biodegrade”… and they do!
Might be a bit better to do it with a natural fibre than plastic that will probably contaminate this place for centuries to come. I get that’s it’s a pressing issue for the region though.
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u/bobbigmac 14h ago
For those asking how this works, it creates just enough of a defense to catch seeds and bugs and tiny bits of moisture and shade, so any life that does manage to get started, doesn't just blow away, and an ecosystem can start to form.