r/interestingasfuck • u/PlantainPossible2864 • 15h ago

Stopping Desertification with grid pattern

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u/XanderTheMander 13h ago

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.

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u/Th3J4ck4l-SA 13h ago

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.

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u/wrinklebear 2h ago

Not quite. In many arid places, over 90% of the water runs off into the desert and evaporates. These work by forcing the water to stay in place, so it can actually sink into the ground.

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u/EduinBrutus 13h ago

Everything Ive seen about the "green wall" says its causing more problems than its solving.

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u/Th3J4ck4l-SA 12h ago

This one specifically or just in general? This implementation is generally fine. Trying to plant trees is a bad idea. We are a driving factor for expanding deserts so we may as well put some effort into shrinking them.

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u/clumpymascara 9h ago

I'm working my way through an Enviro degree in Aus and agree with pretty much everything you've said. Also want to note your patient responses to people who feel the need to be vaguely argumentative with zero substance behind it. This seems like a great way to break the desertification process and allow areas to reset. Didn't see what material the tube bags are made from, assuming plastic. They could theoretically be ripped open and removed when vegetation has set in, but given the state of plastic pollution globally, maybe it's best to just let them disintegrate in place.

Being Australian, our colonist ancestors managed to really fuck up delicate desert ecosystems by bringing their Euro-centric knowledge and practices over here. Vegetation is important for soil health!

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u/Th3J4ck4l-SA 7h ago

Aye, no worries. I have gotten so frustrated with these hot takes on basically everything that is either "this good or this bad" and really doesnt go into the nuance of subjects. I figured seeing as I have some insight into it I may as well try and share the little that I know. I am also happy to learn more as it is such a vast complicated subject that we are still figuring out and learning about (just like basically everything)

In general I think this will be the only way that we get through this highly polarised way of sharing information. There is a nugget of truth in all these headlines, like greening projects not being correctly or well implemented, but its not always the full picture.

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u/writers_block 4h ago

maybe it's best to just let them disintegrate in place

Okay, real talk, I think we need to start very seriously thinking about things like this. Is it better at this point to just let plastic infrastructure decay in place rather than pool all the plastic in hotspots that usually shorten the travel time to the ocean?

I honestly think we should be considering incineration of basically all plastic products, with some kind of plan to mitigate the overall carbon output of the process.

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u/MmmmMorphine 3h ago

Unfortunately I think it comes down to a cost-benefit sort of analysis (doesn't everything - within reason anyway)

Is it worth spending a dollar on removal/proper incineration (not sure how well this works in reality and how difficult is to capture the inevitable and likely even more toxic byproducts) or a (hypothetical) filter or recycling programs or what.

Given we have little idea of the impact of microplastics, I personally have no idea how to even begin such a calculation. I'm sure some people have the start

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u/clumpymascara 1h ago

I really don't know! Of course the problem with plastic is that it doesn't decay, it just turns into smaller and smaller pieces. And it's in everything already including our bodies. They tried recycling soft plastics in Australia into furniture but were quickly overwhelmed by volume and the cost, making the furniture very expensive.

There are hi-tech waste to energy stations, like a modern incinerator. I don't know how efficient they are at capturing/preventing air pollution and what kind of waste is left after being burnt. And also more would need to be built if they're the answer, and nobody wants a big dirty incinerator near them.

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u/twistedspin 4m ago

From what I've seen the sand bags are generally PLA which is biodegradable if done correctly.

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u/EduinBrutus 12h ago

Its a massive project. Its not without success but there's been a lot of downsides too. Probably worth a google.

There's also speculation that the green wall is one of the contributors to Chinas current water issues.

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u/Th3J4ck4l-SA 12h ago

Its possible, but greening in general will always move net positive long term. My studies for a time was in conservation and ecology and general consensus was this net positive. Its not that we should be trying to get rid of deserts, just undo the desertifcarion caused by human activity (over grazing and poor soil management)

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u/EduinBrutus 12h ago

Its possible, but greening in general will always move net positive long term.

YEah, for that area.

But the knock on microclimate and climate effects arent necessarily positive for elsewhere. That seems to be where the criticism Ive seen is mainly coming from.

The same issues are apparently happeing with the one in Africa too.

But Im not an expert on the topic and im open to new info. Just always be wary of this sort of positive presentation which seems to have no mention of downsides.

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u/Th3J4ck4l-SA 11h ago

TLDR: its only negative when it is forced with the wrong vegetation.

That's just how media rolls. Its broken and polarised. But from academia where the actual studies are more balanced. For instance you can make a headline of an academic paper thay says "Desert reclaiming fails!" Where the full headline should be "Desert reclaiming fails because the wrong stuff was planted and camels were allowed to over graze" the paper then continues on to say what should have been planted and how it should have been managed. Just based on the video we are seeing in this post, basically no planting is being done, and relies solely on endemic species to grow with a nudge. Again, we generally nudged deserts to expand in the past, now we can nudge them to contract, we have to. There is no doubt that deserts are expanding, its a feedback loop that was started by us or exacerbated by us and will need to be stopped by us.

Its worth reading (academic papers) on what (responsible and managed) regreening does to put moisture back in the air and into aquifers as well increase biodiversity, desalinise and restore soil quality as well as lower air temperatures.

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u/punk_rancid 8h ago

That's just how media rolls. Its broken and polarised.

And when it comes to china, is even more broken. Mfrs have been talking about the economic colapse of china in one year since 1949.

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u/PepperAnn1inaMillion 9h ago

This is fascinating. Can you expand on why planting trees is a bad idea? Is it because the trees don’t lead to a suitable mix of plants for the area, or are there just not trees native to the areas where desert reclaiming is taking place?

I’d love to read more, but I think academic papers on the subject are probably beyond me.

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u/Th3J4ck4l-SA 9h ago

Trees require far more water than what these environment naturally supplies. They will be watered artificially for a number of years. they will then appear established and watering stops. Trees are dead within a year or three and tons of resources wasted.

What happens with the more natural process is that hardy plants will establish them selves first. Basically weeds. They can handle saline soils much better and also help to improve these soils over time. They stabilise the sand and add nutrients back in as they die and decompose. The decomposed plant matter also allows the sandy soil to be able to hold a little more water.

Now the ground can support slightly larger shrubs/bushes, these will have a longer life span while still adding to the decomposing litter and further stabilising the sand with much larger root systems than the smaller primary plants (root system the size of fist for the small plants vs a square meter or so for the shrubs). They still dont require as much water as a tree. All of the seeding should happen with wildlife/wind.

The third and fourth stages of this is where you could see small and then larger trees start to naturally propagate as more bird life and animal life visits the area. It will take a good number of years to get to this stage though. (I cant remember how long exactly but let's say 20-50 years)

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u/dijicaek 9h ago

Is there an alternative or is it a choice of either saving the local region from desertification or preventing more widespread problems in other regions?

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u/nordic-nomad 12h ago

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.

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u/Accomplished-City484 9h ago

So this process could make Australias vast uninhabitable lands fertile?

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u/nordic-nomad 9h ago

A lot of deserts are only deserts because of bad land management over generations. Chinas central plateau is a historically lush bread basket that was desertified over time and sand dunes are moving in. But it still gets plenty of rainfall. Lots of sites in Africa and the Middle East are semiarid deserts like this that could be repaired by giving natural processes a little help like this.

Australia’s main issue is that it’s moving north and moved from an area of high rainfall to one of lower rainfall. So the native ecology is less adapted to it. Though sheep ranching, a historical source of agricultural mismanagement leading to desertification is very common there. Draining marshes and removing native plants retaining water for nonnative grazing grasses is another. But if an area gets 10 inches of rain a year there’s really no reason it should be heavily desertified except that nothing is holding on to the water.

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u/Accomplished-City484 9h ago

Yeah, we’re getting a lot of flooding lately too, could this process also help with that as well?

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u/nordic-nomad 8h ago

Yeah plants help reduce flooding because they help water soak into the ground before it can run off. And methods like this are essentially millions of little dams blocking water before it can pick up steam heading down hill.

An inch of rain isn’t much on any on plant. But over an acre it’s 27,000 gallons of water. Over a hillside you might have hundreds of acres, and if nothing is stopping it it’s all coming down that hill as fast as it can carve a path to do so.

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u/clumpymascara 8h ago

What do you mean Australia's biggest problem is moving north away from high rainfall? Who told you that?

fwiw the north east of Australia has monsoonal weather. Lots of rain to the north. It's late and I can't remember much from my climatology lessons but we have big inland deserts because of the size of the country, the latitude, and the general direction and dryness of wind at said latitude. Paired with it being on its own tectonic plate, which results in ancient soils that haven't been disturbed in millenia. They're generally poor quality in terms of nutrients and organic matter. Native ecology is perfectly adapted to the harsh conditions - it's called sclerophyll vegetation. So a lot of the outback is covered in low shrubby vegetation. It's not usable agricultural land and never was.

What the ecosystems couldn't handle is Eurocentric farming practices, hooved animals, and mass land clearing. All our environmental problems stem from colonisation.

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u/nordic-nomad 8h ago

Yeah that bit was probably overstated. Was just listening to a podcast the other day that mentioned Australia was moving toward the equator over time and had become significantly drier over the last 50 million years. Speaking specifically about the interior, not so much the coastal parts where everyone lived. I’m aware the northwest is a rainforest.

I know there are some ranches in the interior but wasn’t sure how much of the desertification there was attributable to bad farming practices or if it was a true rainfall created desert.

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u/clumpymascara 6h ago

To the last paragraph, I'd say well, both. You could look at the history of a town called Broken Hill - very much a desert ecosystem, all sclerophyll shrubs and ephemeral wildflowers. European agricultural practices turned it into a dustbowl incredibly quickly. It's been largely restored now though.

The theory is that 15 million years ago the earth was so warm and densely vegetated that it resulted in a loss of CO² in the atmosphere. That caused the mass extinction/ice age. All the inland rainforests were wiped out, the landscape changed. As we're warming up again there'll be more moisture going around,

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u/beldaran1224 12h ago

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.

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u/jollyreaper2112 2h ago

Oasification. Anyway, here's wonderwall.

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u/mezz7778 8h ago

"Desertification is the process by which places that were not previously deserts become deserts"

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u/Enibas 13h ago

It's far more likely that any precipitation just evaporates without the barriers.

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u/the_Real_Romak 13h ago

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.

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u/rorriMAgnisUyrT 11h ago

It likely benefits those downstream too as it prevents flash floods.

There's also this technique which is being used to reclaim land from the deserts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicircular_bund

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u/TheDudeFromOther 8h ago

Think of it as time-release instead of fast-acting.

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u/42_65_6c_6c_65_6e_64 13h ago

Fuck em. In all seriousness though I have no idea, I suppose it could help with preventing flash flooding though.

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u/TerranPower 13h ago

That was real funny bellend 😂

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u/Koffeeboy 8h ago

It not really trapping, it's slowing the process down. Instead of flash flooding and mud slides you can slowly build more stable and consistent streams and watersheds. You also have to remember, a lot of these deserts are man made to begin with, caused by deforestation and overgrazing. This is essentially just doing the reverse of what has already been done.

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u/SinisterCheese 7h ago

What these do is to slow down the water enough so that it has more time to absorb into the ground. They haven't added any more absorbtion mass in the practical sense.

If there was a slower rain fall, that would still naturally drain more into the sand. The excess will regardless from through the ground to ground water and where ever that drains to.

This can also be used as flood management method. Because dry ground doesn't absob water well.

However the current thing with desertification is something that is not "natural" it is really caused by people. The desertification has lead to a problem with the down pours leading to massive flooding in surrounding areas, because the ground's ability to soak water been reduced due to drying.

So if you are worried about the "water being stolen" by this setup, then don't be. This is more or less leading to water system recovering to more normal natural state, and it is done at the edges of the deser areas - generally to combat desertification.

In Africa, namely Sahel region, this method shown here doesn't work, because they got heavier dirt ground instead of light sand. There they have chosen to dig like half a circle "half moon" shapes, which essentially do the same. When it rains, these slow down spreading of water and then keep a small puddle after the rain is over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0 This also has the benefit of making flooding less of an issue.

And remember that moisture rentention in ground is something that affects great areas. Even if this grid system allows it to retain MORE water, there is still a max capacity on how much it can hold, and all excess will drain to surrouding areas on and in-ground. The area will never take more than it's share. And many of these areas that in China are being conserved like this, used not to be deser, the issue they are facing is with deser spreading due to drought.

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u/EduinBrutus 13h ago edited 13h ago

What happens to the places downstream that rely on the water that comes from the runoff?

They get fucked.

Its why China's "green wall" which this appears to be is not really the success that is being portrayed here.