This is not something we want to have grow!

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We know that water shortages are not just looming- they are here.  (Check out this blog post.)  But, we are not only running out of water, desertification is occurring – around the world.

We have seen what Israel has done to reclaim the desert.  In 65 years, it has managed to produce food and vegetation where none had been before (at least in two millennia).  Not only because it developed and championed the use of drip irrigation, Israel found other ways to maximize its meager water resources to gain the upper hand.  It uses water reuse, it desalinates the sea to restore the levels of the Dead Sea.  (It even shares those resources with its neighbor, Jordan.)

But, there are other desertification issues, too.  Northern China- where the Qubqi Desert (Inner Mongolia) is growing in size- has been overgrazed.  Just like our Western US.  In China, the lichen, algae, and moss that were vital for keeping the soil in place are gone- so the soil is going away, too.  Planting grass (this research project is using Salix, a grassy willow) can help- but the soil between the grass can still be blown away.

Land Reclamation

But, Chunxiang Hu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Hydrobiology) has been spending a lot of money- and research time- to reclaim the Qubqi desert in northern China. She and her team (Drs. Shubin Lan, Qingvi Zhang, Li Wu, Yonging Liu, and Del Zhang) coat the dunes that have been planted with grasses with cyanobacteria (which employ photosynthesis) that can survive in the arid/semi-arid regions.  The researchers reported their results in the journal, Environmental Science and Technology.

The cyanobacteria are first cultured in ponds, and then the solution is trucked to the areas to be recovered and sprayed on the dunes.  Once there, they convert the atmospheric carbon and nourish the soil with their photosynthetic activity.  After eight (8) years, there is now a 1 cm thick bio-crust where shade exists- but only about 4 mm thick where it’s sunny.

Given this success, Hu plans to expand the experiment to cover 133 km2 between now and 2018.   That’s not going to make a big difference yet, though, since this is about the size of Granada or the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean.

 

 

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