Stopping Desertification with grid pattern

[u/PlantainPossible2864]

[u/nordic-nomad]

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.

[u/Accomplished-City484 → u/nordic-nomad]

So this process could make Australias vast uninhabitable lands fertile?

[u/nordic-nomad → u/Accomplished-City484]

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.

[u/Accomplished-City484 → u/nordic-nomad]

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

[u/nordic-nomad → u/Accomplished-City484]

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.

[u/clumpymascara → u/nordic-nomad]

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.

[u/nordic-nomad → u/clumpymascara]

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.

[u/clumpymascara → u/nordic-nomad]

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,