This is again a project of an unfathomable scale that's just been completed in China and barely anyone has heard of it in the rest of the world China has just finished constructing a continuous 3,046-kilometer (1,892-mile) green barrier - made of plants and trees - completely encircling the... Taklamakan Desert, the world's second-largest shifting sand desert which is about the size of Germany (!). To put this in perspective, this is like building a living wall from Paris to Istanbul, or from Los Angeles to Chicago – except they built it in one of the world's most inhospitable environments. They spent about 40 years building this "green wall". The final 285 kilometers was completed in 2024 on November 28. They built the "wall" with desert-hardy plants like Populus euphratica (desert poplar), Haloxylon (saxaul), and Tamarix (salt cedar), along with innovative sand-control engineering and solar panel installations. The objective of the project is to contain the desert's expansion and to protect surrounding agricultural areas and cities from sandstorms. Before this project, many towns in the region had to be relocated multiple times due to encroaching sand. For instance, the town of Qira in Xinjiang had to move three times in its history, with sand dunes once approaching as close as 1.5 kilometers from the town center. This is easily one of human history's most ambitious and grandest ecological engineering projects. It's insane when you think about it: completely containing a desert the size of Germany! And it's also insane how little attention this has received globally: sadly we've apparently lost the capacity to be impressed by such a project, let alone have the boldness of vision to conceive of one ourselves. All resulting in the fact that whilst China is out there completing 40-year missions to tame entire deserts, we can barely fix potholes in our roads.show more

I saw a lot of questions related to how they choose whether to use plants, solar panels, or sand-control engineering in different sections of the green wall. This is a great video by @FriedaLi3 that explains this 👇

O but at what cost? What about The Desert right to self determination?

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Amazing project ! In the meantime, we have new plastic bottle caps on Evian and co. In Europe.🙌

To each their level of ambition 🥲

sorry i prefer spending $42 million a month on OnlyFans

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China has built a 3,000 kilometer long Green Great Wall around the Taklamakan Desert. In the long run, I believe this is part of China's efforts to turn the Taklamakan Desert into the oasis. The Taklamakan Desert has not always been a desert. 2000 years ago, there were some ancient kingdoms here, such as the famous ancient city of Jingjue. However, as the Earth's climate declined, evaporation and precipitation decreased, these ancient civilizations disappeared, and this land gradually became covered by deserts. But for a long time to come, the Earth's temperature will obviously rise, global precipitation will increase, melting snow in surrounding mountains will also increase, and water supply in the Taklamakan Desert is increasing. We even heard some "flood" news in Taklamakan desert last year. It is not surprising that oases will reappear. The strength of Chinese civilization is actually strongly positively correlated with the Earth's temperature. The two strongest dynasties in Chinese history, the Han Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty, were both among the hottest period on Earth, and now the Earth's temperature is rising again........

Interesting, thanks!

BBC "New research in environmental science shows that improper afforestation may have a negative impact on the environment; The research subjects include afforestation projects in the northern deserts of China."

Classic... They had to find a negative angle on it, didn't they...