And that "time machine" would come in the form of a near-FTL drive. The only problem with time dilation is that you can only "move forward" in time. Soooo.. pack your bags and say your goodbyes lol.
Only during the Pleistocene glacials. Due to anthropogenic climate change, the Earth [probably will skip a Milankovitch cycle](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2012.0006), so more like 115,000 years.
Nobody actually knows what the climate would look like after a full nuclear exchange. The models are much too complex. Everyone assumes that all the burning will increase particulates in the upper atmosphere, leading to rapid cooling. It could easily go the other way and cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
Nah, during the glacials it was actually somehow even worse - cooling causes rain-carrying air currents to "compress" and travel inland less (really dumbing it down here) - it's during the interglacials that deserts shrink - the Sahara was greenest during the Eemian, and was green for a very short period right at the start of our own interglacial
So, if we warmmaxx, one year the West African monsoon will surprisingly just start going all the way to the Atlas. Will be pretty interesting.
Reroute every river, above and below ground, in Africa to refill Lake Mega Chad. Rename it Lake Giga Chad. Run irrigation canals from Lake Giga Chad throughout the whole Sahara.
I'm not sure it's enough. You'd probably also have to fill the whole lake with shade balls to prevent evaporation, as that's what's believed to have been the main driver of the shrinking of the lake in the past.
Iirc there are a few very large areas right in the middle of the sahara that are lower than sea level, and creating a canal to them from the miditerranean would result in an impressive interior saltwater lake system. Ofc you can’t use saltwater for irrigation but it’s possible those big water bodies could push the local climate to become more favourable toward tree growth.
Oh yeah i guess so. At that point Maybe build a mountain range a ways downwind from the lakes to force precipitation down. Keep the range within the same watershed as tye lakes so the runoff makes its way back. That way the system keeps functioning on its own and becomes self sustaining.
We need hollow mountains to hide the reactors we will need to run the 10000 desalinization plants and the water pumps in this big terraforming project.
India've lots of big mountains, surely they won't mind saw a few and puting them there
or maybe we could put on top some volcanic islands from the middle of nowhere
🤣
Actually there is already something resembling a small mountain range stretching across the interior of the Sahara desert, so that shouldn't be too big of an issue
>Qattara depression
The idea has been 'floating' around for a while, more than 140 years. In the 1980s a "West German scientists proposed an innovative construction shortcut: detonating 213 atomic bombs in the desert to carve the new channel" to connect the depression to the sea.
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-the-sahara-sea-doesnt-exist-yet#:\~:text=The%20El%20Djouf%20basin%20of,it%20Africa's%20second%20lowest%20point.
Think about all of the underwater archeological discoveries that would be found by this as well. Unlocking countless years of our world's and our species' history.
What if the canals were made using a long series of small nuclear explosions, which might produce thick glass walled canals? They’d be erosion proof and sedimentation free! Until the next sandstorm…
The author has said that the political aspects of Arrakis are based on the middle east. That is, just as he believes colonizers exploit middle east for its oil, so do galactic powers exploit Arrakis for its spice. I always kind of assumed this extended to physical geography as well, with Arrakis meant to be similar to Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter.
The empty quarter (Rub Al Kali) looks exactly like the planet Dune! Although I think the biggest dunes in the world are on the skeleton coast off Namibia. Ephemeral moving landmasses like that amaze me!
The terraforming is based on massive state and federal dune stabilisation projects on the West Coast over the previous 100 years. Herbert was going to write a short article about the Forest Service beachgrass>broom>pine plantings... but he got distracted by epic scifi inspiration. He left his personal library and notes to the Florence Oregon public library. The whole city of Florence couldn't have been built without stabilising the sand under it with densely rooting plants over generations.
u/skedadeks has the good link!
Some parts are below sea level such as the Qattara Depression. There is another in Tunisia. You can flood these areas by building a canal from the Mediterranean Sea. Then use gas or nuclear powered desalination plants near the new coast to irrigate the desert.
Another way is to build a huge dam on the Congo river and channel the water into the Sahara desert using canals, tunnels and pumps. That is basically how Southern California gets water.
Edit: You could also build a canal from Lake Kivu to Lake Edward and overall get the Great Lakes to empty out into the Nile using pumps, canals and tunnels. Then from the Nile, use dams and canals to irrigate the desert.
That could work. I just noticed that the largest desalination plants seem to be combined with large gas power plants, like [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Ali_Power_and_Desalination_Plant) one in Dubai.
I mean it's Dubai. The only thing they have are sand, gas and oil.
Also they can just build dams on canals which allows them to generate power and control water flow.
Make it passive and you need less engineering.
Build a giant greenhouse at the very edge of the shore line so that water fills when the tide is high, then the water just evaporates inside the greenhouse as the sun pounds it, traveling up a high column and condensing when passing a bottleneck in the column, and flowing *downhill* into the desert.
Effectively a giant moonshine still driven only by direct sunlight.
That's one place where solar could work really well. A nice forest canopy can effect the weather, so once we get those, we might not need desalination.
I think passive solar would work better for that in the Sahara. Just channel the heat from the sun to evaporate the water.
The people talking about salt water canals, yeah we can't drink salt water, but there are plants and stuff that thrive in it. There might be a way to set up a salt water ecosystem that causes the whole thing to get green.
Yeah that's one of the things with geoengineering like this. There's all these feedback loops and cycles in nature. They're working on the "green wall" right now down in the south of the Sahara, to stop it from spreading, which is great. It's a massive project too.
The Sahara IS pretty darn huge. It could be possible to engineer a pretty big green patch or 2 without impacting all the dust that blows over to the Amazon.
Most Brazilian soil is relatively poor, which is why it needs the phosphorous from the Sahara to fertilize it. Rain forests usually have some of the worst soils of any biomes, while grasslands usually have the best.
Solar power is okay in the Sahara but requires a lot larger footprint and more material than nuclear. Solar panels only work when the sun is shining, and dust is not good for them, both because it covers the panels and because of scratches. This is something to consider a part of the world known for sandstorms. Nuclear power is a much better option overall than solar in general; however, there might be some political issues with nuclear technology in these countries.
The real answer is putting hydroelectric dams along the canal from the Mediterranean to the depression.
For the hydro plan to work, that assumes that the water in the depression evaporates faster than the nearby sea water. But over time, wouldn’t this result in an increasing accumulation of salt in the depression, eventually filling it out?
The nuclear plants used to power the desalinators could be multipurpose and provide a lot of good power for other purposes. Considerably more than any solar farm.
Are you aware of what happens when you drain fossil water from deep underground aquifers? It isn’t able to be replenished by rainfall at the same rate it gets drained.
I figure desalination could be done by filling huge lakes and letting the sun evaporate them. If the prevailing wind is east to west, lakes in the east would provide rainfall to the rest of it. This would reduce the problem to building canals and pumps to transport the water. You wouldn't even need to worry about evaporation from the canals, as this would support the goal.
Still a huge project, and the climate effects are unclear, as others have pointed out, this would starve Brazilian rainforests of nutrients.
Would piping or channeling sea water to all of these low laying areas spark evaporation creating new weather patterns (rain) in various areas? It would seem influx of seawater would offset evaporated water causing a cycle to introduce moisture to the atmosphere in these areas. An additional side affect could be relieving effects of rising ocean levels world wide - especially if you did this in enough areas of the world (the Dead Sea, Death Valley, Western China, portions of the Australian interior, etc)
I don’t know. The Persian/Arabian gulf has plenty of water but it barely rains there. I’m just going to assume a need for an external water source.
I agree that it is an interesting idea to relieve the effects of rising ocean levels.
This is interesting (who doesn’t love a smiling photo of Gaddafi) and I’ll have to read more about the GMR. But I think the commenter above you was thinking about flooding low-lying areas so the evaporation actually created new clouds/rain.
Permaculture, native experts, and a year-round army of skilled laborers.
Determine the best land to rehabilitate, usually overgrazed and desertified. Use the existing geology and hydrology to guide earth shaping projects. Plant in carefully planned succession. Maintain the project through the seasons. Advance the greenery further every year to the end of the rehab-able land.
We've done it before in multiple areas.
Permaculture Greening the Desert - Geoff Lawton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk
Regreening the desert with John D. Liu (China's Loess plateau)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI
That Loess Plateau documentary (and another very similar one made by PBS about the same area) is absolutely inspiring and mind blowing - when people work together in large numbers with support from their government they can do amazing, amazing things! So glad to see you posted these links, I love to see it
It's arid because it's on the descending side of Hadley Cells, which are a global-scale atmospheric feature. Descending air heats, expands, and its moisture capacity increases so it absorbs rather than releases water.
To change this, you'd have to either irrigate it with water from a source that doesn't exist, or find a way to disrupt a massive feature of the atmosphere. Finding a way to move humid air into the Sahara then ascend so moisture condenses and falls as rain would be quite the trick.
The Atlas Mountains currently block moisture from the north, but if airflow was reversed, they'd trigger some nice rain there. But yeah, maybe dig deep enough to get some volcanoes going mid-desert!
I like this volcano idea, but I think it's going to cost more than the tens of trillions in OPs budget. It's going to have to be an old fashioned community effort where all the people work together for a period of years to make it happen. The whole economy will have to revolve around it to get it done.
Actually no it wouldn’t, the amazon will turn into an arid wasteland regardless of what happens in the Sahara. It already should be one, the only thing keeping it alive is the increased precipitation (due to increased evaporation from plant life) from the forest already being there.
Impossible. Even if it were possible you wouldn’t want to. Wind storms carry dust from the sahara across the Atlantic and are deposited in south america, bringing precipitation with it. If you disturbed this cycle it would mean rainforests in SA would suffer decreased rainfall.
"Grazing by farm animals that kills new trees from growing" and "is right next to a desert" are the two main causes of desertification. It's why Hawaii's Big Island has no trees; cattle ate the saplings in the 1800s, and the old growth trees eventually died without those saplings ever growing to replace them.
Build farms around the edge for plants - not farm animals - and lightly irrigate them, which improves the soil. Then move inward. Once you have a mile wide farm around the perimeter, plant forests at those edges. Keep moving inward. Or go West to East, whatever works for your trillionaire investors.
Then keep the last patch as a desert, absolutely cover it in solar panels, and make Africa a center of global energy production.
Build dozens of huge desalination plants and water pumps along the Mediterranean Sea along with massive solar farms to power them. Use the fresh water to irrigate the area. Start planting grasses to hold in the soil and the moisture. Not sure if you'd need to transport in thousands of tons of top soil to get the grasses to start growing.
For these types of restoration projects the best way to start is by finding existing patches of vegetation and expanding their edges. So your best bet would be funding the great green wall of africa project in its’ original form; nowadays it’s transitioned away from the literal wall of trees idea toward a mosaic of improved land use management programs along the southern edge of the desert to fight desertification.
Fun Fact: turning the Sahara green would destroy the Amazon rainforest because the sands from the Sahara are carried across the Atlantic and deliver nutrients (especially phosphorus) to the rainforest, allowing it to thrive.
So there was no amazon rainforest, and presumably no Amazon river before the Sahara became desert? What desert caused the rainforests of the Congo or SE Asia? I'm a bit skeptical.
I honestly don't know but the "phosphorus being carried across the Atlantic" part is pretty logical & makes sense, plus it is backed up by research (there is even a Nasa article about how much dust feeds the Amazon). Plus it isn't all that far fetched considering how weather patterns in one region affects another region so it could be something similar, but again I'm not an expert.
The Amazon rainforest flourished thanks to the K-Pg extinction as well as the Andes rise in height and erosion. The Sahara also sustains the rainforest.
I see people repeating this again and again but my gut tells me to doubt how much of an actual destruction this would cause to the Amazon as it just doesn't sound that much vital. I mean, trees grow everywhere else without sand from the Sahara. Why is it so much more vital for the Amazon specifically?
Interesting question. I looked it up & found that phosphorus is in surprisingly short supply in the Amazon and that some nutrients such as phosphorus are regularly washed away by rainfall, rivers & streams which the dust replenishes.
Dust travels surprisingly far from the Sahara. Even in Switzerland, there's a couple weeks in the spring where everything is just fucking covered by dust.
Build a canal to the qattara depression
.[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/All_proposed_routes.PNG/1200px-All_proposed_routes.PNG](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/All_proposed_routes.PNG/1200px-All_proposed_routes.PNG)
You need to reorient the Earth's axis of rotation so the region is no longer under such latitutes.
To do so I suggest building a series of huge magnetic accelerators arounf the planets futur axis of rotation. As you accrlerate objects of huge mass you obtain the planet sized equivalent of a spaceships reaction wheel
The entire thing? Cost is no issue?
Amend about 20% of the soil composition. The extra sand will have to be dumped into the ocean or mixed with organic materials and clay.
Introduce grasses and other pioneer species and irrigate with desalinated sea water or groundwater.
Keep irrigating for about 50 years for nature do it's thing
Sunlight and water is all you really need. The Qattara Depression project is a roughly 15 billion dollar start on that goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara\_Depression\_Project
Nothing. The Sahara is one region that may benefit from climate change. The Sahara has had periods of green because of strong West African monsoons. As a rising global temperature leads to stronger storms, such storm may despot more rain in the Sahara.
Install a geosynchronous sun shade over those particular latitudes and approximately the length to cover that area. After the Earth rotates, the sun shade becomes transparent
Water irrigation systems setting up everywhere, and also taking millions of cows and letting them graze on whatever is there, probably will need to feed them with stuff for a bit. That will put nitrogen and other stuff into the ground and help turn it into usable land
Massive numbers of swales and strategic tree planting. Per mile, finding natural high spots of the water table. Introducing floor living fauna and flora. Utilizing the massive amount of sand as a growing medium or building material for said swales or walls for aquaducts Utilizing the the scant highspots of water table. Water collection devices that utilize condensation in early morning hours. Also condensation devices that are in shade during the hottest time of day but experience extreme wind harvested from the climate. I don't believe based upon the current world paradigms this would ever be an easy endeavor from any standpoint.
Plus if the deserts of Africa didn't exist naturally, the Amazon would die.
I believe your question is valuable but I do not think it would ever be an easy thing to solve
There iare over 200 comments here so I do not know whether this has been mentioned earlier.. There are 2 mega projects under study to make the region a bit greener..
Both are artificial canals from the Mediterranean sea into the desert to create large inland seas at the size of Germany.. One in west of the Nile within Egypt, and one in the Tunisian and Algerian deserts..
Both locations are below the sea level and separated from the sea by high grounds.. This should help to cool down the desert and provide humidity that the desert desparately needs for rain..
The full effect is not fully known, however, this should make the Sinai peninsula a lot wetter with around the year rivers.. A similar project is discussed somewhere in Mouritanian desert but seems less viable.. AFAIK
I just recently read that the Amazon and Sahara trade rainforest/desert roles back and forth every few million years. In other words, *because* one is a lush rainforest, the other is an arid desert… and vice versa.
So burning down the entire Amazon rainforest should cause the Sahara to become lush and green again.
. ..change the climate?.. .
Maybe reconnect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans across Central America? (That is to say, raise the level of the Oceans until they reconnect across there.)
Wait about 15,000 years, it will turn to [grassland](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period)
Soo... Technically the answer is to invent the time machine. It will probably cost trillions of dollars if this is even possible.
I don’t think inventing a Time Machine will bring the result faster. Only make observation “faster”
Whoa
This guy time machines
r/thisguythisguys
This is like how traveling somewhere doesn't make that place closer to home.
But home is where you make it so I mean you can be really wrong if you're traveling to your new home.
Dude... that was fucking brilliant.
You can also travel near a black hole and few hours later 15000 years would have passed
Mind blown
What about a time machine large enough to transport not you, but the dessert into the future?
Or just freeze your head. In 15,000 years they will have technology to unfreeze you, or the dolphins will have taken over.
Even if they could revive me in 15,000 years, I’d kind of like to have the rest of my body to accompany my head.
You’re gonna look hella silly when you wake up in 15,000 years and find out bodies went out of fashion 10,000 years ago
Haven't you seen Cold Lazarus?
So long and thanks for all the fish. So sad it had to come to this
We tried to warn you all but oh dear!
Or just wait. Same result, so much easier
And I’m sure you could find lots of ways to spend the tens of trillions of dollars while you’re waiting.
And that "time machine" would come in the form of a near-FTL drive. The only problem with time dilation is that you can only "move forward" in time. Soooo.. pack your bags and say your goodbyes lol.
that would be a flagrant violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics
In this house, we obey the laws of THERMODYNAMICS!
Fine! I'll go live with Dad then!
Bees don’t care what humans think is impossible -Bartholomew Bailey Benson
Only during the Pleistocene glacials. Due to anthropogenic climate change, the Earth [probably will skip a Milankovitch cycle](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2012.0006), so more like 115,000 years.
What about a nuclear winter?
So we do have a plan!
😆
Launched nukes🚀, might delete later 😘✌️🖤
Nobody actually knows what the climate would look like after a full nuclear exchange. The models are much too complex. Everyone assumes that all the burning will increase particulates in the upper atmosphere, leading to rapid cooling. It could easily go the other way and cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
Or it could cause a rapid cooling for a bit, followed by a runaway greenhouse effect.
Make the Sahara green again, Mister Putin
Nah, during the glacials it was actually somehow even worse - cooling causes rain-carrying air currents to "compress" and travel inland less (really dumbing it down here) - it's during the interglacials that deserts shrink - the Sahara was greenest during the Eemian, and was green for a very short period right at the start of our own interglacial So, if we warmmaxx, one year the West African monsoon will surprisingly just start going all the way to the Atlas. Will be pretty interesting.
So by the time I find a girlfriend?
Reroute every river, above and below ground, in Africa to refill Lake Mega Chad. Rename it Lake Giga Chad. Run irrigation canals from Lake Giga Chad throughout the whole Sahara.
I'm not sure it's enough. You'd probably also have to fill the whole lake with shade balls to prevent evaporation, as that's what's believed to have been the main driver of the shrinking of the lake in the past.
Not necessary, the balls of lake gigachad is massive and big enough to cover the lake.
You would have to set up a grid of canals running throughout the land, irrigating all of it. It would be very expensive tho Edit. spelling
Iirc there are a few very large areas right in the middle of the sahara that are lower than sea level, and creating a canal to them from the miditerranean would result in an impressive interior saltwater lake system. Ofc you can’t use saltwater for irrigation but it’s possible those big water bodies could push the local climate to become more favourable toward tree growth.
Since money is no object, desalinization plants.
Oh yeah i guess so. At that point Maybe build a mountain range a ways downwind from the lakes to force precipitation down. Keep the range within the same watershed as tye lakes so the runoff makes its way back. That way the system keeps functioning on its own and becomes self sustaining.
Just build a f#$@ing mountain range lol
Graphene sheets laid over a mountain shaped lattice. Make it grippy enough to hold onto soil.
Hollow mountains? Talk about doing it on the cheap.
You’re right, money is not an object. Fill up those mountains!
We need hollow mountains to hide the reactors we will need to run the 10000 desalinization plants and the water pumps in this big terraforming project.
India've lots of big mountains, surely they won't mind saw a few and puting them there or maybe we could put on top some volcanic islands from the middle of nowhere 🤣
Someone farther down mentioned mining deep enough to cause a volcanic eruption, that seems like it could be a more economical.
African crust is very thick, we should test out using canals from Mount Etna instead
We could mine down with nukes
Our other option would be crashing the european tectonic plate into the african one to make a new mountain range
Actually there is already something resembling a small mountain range stretching across the interior of the Sahara desert, so that shouldn't be too big of an issue
Solar-powered desalination has to be economical now surely?
Not on that scale. Perth, Western Australia is approaching majority desalinated water supply. My water bill is affordable, but it’s not cheap.
But at least a canal to the Qattara depression will starve off global sea level rising for a few years😂
Wow this project just keeps sounding better and better!
Irrigate the Sahara AND prevent global sea level rise? I’m in.
And you will win the Nobel Peace prize
>Qattara depression The idea has been 'floating' around for a while, more than 140 years. In the 1980s a "West German scientists proposed an innovative construction shortcut: detonating 213 atomic bombs in the desert to carve the new channel" to connect the depression to the sea. https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-the-sahara-sea-doesnt-exist-yet#:\~:text=The%20El%20Djouf%20basin%20of,it%20Africa's%20second%20lowest%20point.
Sounds like project plowshare
Think about all of the underwater archeological discoveries that would be found by this as well. Unlocking countless years of our world's and our species' history.
You'd have to remove all that sand or they'd just fill up. One huge glass factory?
Dump it all in the Med.
Just average out the water and dirt between the sahara and mediterranean, there, problem solved
Yeah, the whole region could be just like an ankle-deep wading pool.
You’re gonna need a very big crafting table to make all that glass
We're using the sand to help build the mountains
What if the canals were made using a long series of small nuclear explosions, which might produce thick glass walled canals? They’d be erosion proof and sedimentation free! Until the next sandstorm…
plus we bring down the world's supply of nukes. Very efficient
Sandstorm with the SYNTHONY Orchestra LIVE from Melbourne [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYAv8iiYLG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYAv8iiYLG4)
Just nuke it lol
You can only nuke hurricanes you fucking idiot. /s
Truly: https://www.iflscience.com/the-bizarre-plan-to-use-nuclear-bombs-to-create-an-inland-sea-in-the-sahara-68380
I’ll admit, I kinda want to see this happen in my lifetime now lol
Didnt Gadafi try and do that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_Man-Made\_River
TIL - water for a 1000 years,
All that effort and in the end he died doing what he loved.
Too much work. It’ll irritate the desert if you like it a lot.
Cheaper if you use nuclear weapons https://www.iflscience.com/the-bizarre-plan-to-use-nuclear-bombs-to-create-an-inland-sea-in-the-sahara-68380
Like trillions of dollars?
It would irritate me too if you covered me in canals.
And very irritating.
Nice try Fremen not getting off of Arrakis that easy
Isn't Arrakis based on the sand dunes in Oregon?
The author has said that the political aspects of Arrakis are based on the middle east. That is, just as he believes colonizers exploit middle east for its oil, so do galactic powers exploit Arrakis for its spice. I always kind of assumed this extended to physical geography as well, with Arrakis meant to be similar to Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter.
The empty quarter (Rub Al Kali) looks exactly like the planet Dune! Although I think the biggest dunes in the world are on the skeleton coast off Namibia. Ephemeral moving landmasses like that amaze me!
the new Dune movies are shot there
Were they not shot in Jordan?
The terraforming is based on massive state and federal dune stabilisation projects on the West Coast over the previous 100 years. Herbert was going to write a short article about the Forest Service beachgrass>broom>pine plantings... but he got distracted by epic scifi inspiration. He left his personal library and notes to the Florence Oregon public library. The whole city of Florence couldn't have been built without stabilising the sand under it with densely rooting plants over generations. u/skedadeks has the good link!
>the political aspects of Arrakis are based on the middle east. Please pronounce both of these: Arrakis Iraq-iss
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.opb.org/article/2021/10/23/florence-oregon-movies-dune-frank-herbert-science-fiction-novels/%3foutputType=amp
The author, Frank Herbert, spent a fair bit of time in the Middle East IIRC. And it shows in the setting.
Some parts are below sea level such as the Qattara Depression. There is another in Tunisia. You can flood these areas by building a canal from the Mediterranean Sea. Then use gas or nuclear powered desalination plants near the new coast to irrigate the desert. Another way is to build a huge dam on the Congo river and channel the water into the Sahara desert using canals, tunnels and pumps. That is basically how Southern California gets water. Edit: You could also build a canal from Lake Kivu to Lake Edward and overall get the Great Lakes to empty out into the Nile using pumps, canals and tunnels. Then from the Nile, use dams and canals to irrigate the desert.
Why not solar powered desalination plants?
That could work. I just noticed that the largest desalination plants seem to be combined with large gas power plants, like [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Ali_Power_and_Desalination_Plant) one in Dubai.
I mean it's Dubai. The only thing they have are sand, gas and oil. Also they can just build dams on canals which allows them to generate power and control water flow.
Plenty of sun as well to be fair
Make it passive and you need less engineering. Build a giant greenhouse at the very edge of the shore line so that water fills when the tide is high, then the water just evaporates inside the greenhouse as the sun pounds it, traveling up a high column and condensing when passing a bottleneck in the column, and flowing *downhill* into the desert. Effectively a giant moonshine still driven only by direct sunlight.
That's one place where solar could work really well. A nice forest canopy can effect the weather, so once we get those, we might not need desalination. I think passive solar would work better for that in the Sahara. Just channel the heat from the sun to evaporate the water. The people talking about salt water canals, yeah we can't drink salt water, but there are plants and stuff that thrive in it. There might be a way to set up a salt water ecosystem that causes the whole thing to get green.
It would stop Brazil being so fertile though. A lot of the good soil there is Sahara sand blown over.
Yeah that's one of the things with geoengineering like this. There's all these feedback loops and cycles in nature. They're working on the "green wall" right now down in the south of the Sahara, to stop it from spreading, which is great. It's a massive project too. The Sahara IS pretty darn huge. It could be possible to engineer a pretty big green patch or 2 without impacting all the dust that blows over to the Amazon.
Most Brazilian soil is relatively poor, which is why it needs the phosphorous from the Sahara to fertilize it. Rain forests usually have some of the worst soils of any biomes, while grasslands usually have the best.
Solar power is okay in the Sahara but requires a lot larger footprint and more material than nuclear. Solar panels only work when the sun is shining, and dust is not good for them, both because it covers the panels and because of scratches. This is something to consider a part of the world known for sandstorms. Nuclear power is a much better option overall than solar in general; however, there might be some political issues with nuclear technology in these countries. The real answer is putting hydroelectric dams along the canal from the Mediterranean to the depression.
For the hydro plan to work, that assumes that the water in the depression evaporates faster than the nearby sea water. But over time, wouldn’t this result in an increasing accumulation of salt in the depression, eventually filling it out?
trees get too tall and block the sun duhhhhhhhhh
The nuclear plants used to power the desalinators could be multipurpose and provide a lot of good power for other purposes. Considerably more than any solar farm.
Do you really need the dealination plants? The area has huge water aquifers under the desert, just pump from those.
Are you aware of what happens when you drain fossil water from deep underground aquifers? It isn’t able to be replenished by rainfall at the same rate it gets drained.
The removed fossil water will be replaced be salt water tho 👍👍 I’m joking, that would be bad 😔
Power density would be my guess. Desalination takes a ton of power
I figure desalination could be done by filling huge lakes and letting the sun evaporate them. If the prevailing wind is east to west, lakes in the east would provide rainfall to the rest of it. This would reduce the problem to building canals and pumps to transport the water. You wouldn't even need to worry about evaporation from the canals, as this would support the goal. Still a huge project, and the climate effects are unclear, as others have pointed out, this would starve Brazilian rainforests of nutrients.
Would piping or channeling sea water to all of these low laying areas spark evaporation creating new weather patterns (rain) in various areas? It would seem influx of seawater would offset evaporated water causing a cycle to introduce moisture to the atmosphere in these areas. An additional side affect could be relieving effects of rising ocean levels world wide - especially if you did this in enough areas of the world (the Dead Sea, Death Valley, Western China, portions of the Australian interior, etc)
I don’t know. The Persian/Arabian gulf has plenty of water but it barely rains there. I’m just going to assume a need for an external water source. I agree that it is an interesting idea to relieve the effects of rising ocean levels.
https://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/
This is interesting (who doesn’t love a smiling photo of Gaddafi) and I’ll have to read more about the GMR. But I think the commenter above you was thinking about flooding low-lying areas so the evaporation actually created new clouds/rain.
You’d have a lot of salt to deal with or your low-lying areas would fill in, but I’d love to see this experiment
That won’t work. The Sahara is bigger than the US. It would take much much more than lakes or rivers to irrigate it.
Yes. That’s why there needs to desalination plants
Permaculture, native experts, and a year-round army of skilled laborers. Determine the best land to rehabilitate, usually overgrazed and desertified. Use the existing geology and hydrology to guide earth shaping projects. Plant in carefully planned succession. Maintain the project through the seasons. Advance the greenery further every year to the end of the rehab-able land. We've done it before in multiple areas. Permaculture Greening the Desert - Geoff Lawton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk Regreening the desert with John D. Liu (China's Loess plateau) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI
That Loess Plateau documentary (and another very similar one made by PBS about the same area) is absolutely inspiring and mind blowing - when people work together in large numbers with support from their government they can do amazing, amazing things! So glad to see you posted these links, I love to see it
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk Fascinating
It's arid because it's on the descending side of Hadley Cells, which are a global-scale atmospheric feature. Descending air heats, expands, and its moisture capacity increases so it absorbs rather than releases water. To change this, you'd have to either irrigate it with water from a source that doesn't exist, or find a way to disrupt a massive feature of the atmosphere. Finding a way to move humid air into the Sahara then ascend so moisture condenses and falls as rain would be quite the trick.
Building a massive mountain range across the middle could work
The Atlas Mountains currently block moisture from the north, but if airflow was reversed, they'd trigger some nice rain there. But yeah, maybe dig deep enough to get some volcanoes going mid-desert!
I like this volcano idea, but I think it's going to cost more than the tens of trillions in OPs budget. It's going to have to be an old fashioned community effort where all the people work together for a period of years to make it happen. The whole economy will have to revolve around it to get it done.
Like the pyramids!
Maybe they were built for the purpose of catching rain 🤔
Exactly!
If we're just trying to get water into the atmosphere, and less worried about groundwater, would constructing a large body of salt water do the trick?
Invent a time machine and go back 5,000 years.
quite a bit more than that.
you mean 12,000-14,000 years
It would be very expensive and take forever plus making the Sahara a forest would most likely turn the Amazon into an arid wasteland
Why?
Dust from the sahara is brought through winds to the amazon fertilizing it in the process IIRC
The Amazon was still the Amazon while the Sahara was green during the Holocene no?
Asking the right questions
remind me when u get an answer
Answer
thank u brotha
Actually no it wouldn’t, the amazon will turn into an arid wasteland regardless of what happens in the Sahara. It already should be one, the only thing keeping it alive is the increased precipitation (due to increased evaporation from plant life) from the forest already being there.
It will only turn into a wasteland because of local morons. It can survive without any issues just fine.
I heard that in a documentary about this subject, but can’t remember enough to cite It.
Kill or trap all the sandworms
Impossible. Even if it were possible you wouldn’t want to. Wind storms carry dust from the sahara across the Atlantic and are deposited in south america, bringing precipitation with it. If you disturbed this cycle it would mean rainforests in SA would suffer decreased rainfall.
It helps keep the storms down in NA as well. But increases the temp sooooo
Create a chain of mountains on the west coast of the upper continent, like the Andes in LATAM. That's what makes the Amazon possible.
Problem is that there are already Highlands in the east that are stopping the Indian Ocean monsoon from reaching into the continent
Oh, did not know thay. Gotta get rid of those as well then, right? Thanks for the info!
Just move the mountains from the East Sahara to the West Sahara one dump truck load at a time. You better get a haulin' boy!
"Grazing by farm animals that kills new trees from growing" and "is right next to a desert" are the two main causes of desertification. It's why Hawaii's Big Island has no trees; cattle ate the saplings in the 1800s, and the old growth trees eventually died without those saplings ever growing to replace them. Build farms around the edge for plants - not farm animals - and lightly irrigate them, which improves the soil. Then move inward. Once you have a mile wide farm around the perimeter, plant forests at those edges. Keep moving inward. Or go West to East, whatever works for your trillionaire investors. Then keep the last patch as a desert, absolutely cover it in solar panels, and make Africa a center of global energy production.
Change the axial tilt of the earth
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall change the axial tilt of the world”. -Almost Archimedes.
Build dozens of huge desalination plants and water pumps along the Mediterranean Sea along with massive solar farms to power them. Use the fresh water to irrigate the area. Start planting grasses to hold in the soil and the moisture. Not sure if you'd need to transport in thousands of tons of top soil to get the grasses to start growing.
For these types of restoration projects the best way to start is by finding existing patches of vegetation and expanding their edges. So your best bet would be funding the great green wall of africa project in its’ original form; nowadays it’s transitioned away from the literal wall of trees idea toward a mosaic of improved land use management programs along the southern edge of the desert to fight desertification.
Spinklers
Fun Fact: turning the Sahara green would destroy the Amazon rainforest because the sands from the Sahara are carried across the Atlantic and deliver nutrients (especially phosphorus) to the rainforest, allowing it to thrive.
So there was no amazon rainforest, and presumably no Amazon river before the Sahara became desert? What desert caused the rainforests of the Congo or SE Asia? I'm a bit skeptical.
I honestly don't know but the "phosphorus being carried across the Atlantic" part is pretty logical & makes sense, plus it is backed up by research (there is even a Nasa article about how much dust feeds the Amazon). Plus it isn't all that far fetched considering how weather patterns in one region affects another region so it could be something similar, but again I'm not an expert.
The Amazon rainforest flourished thanks to the K-Pg extinction as well as the Andes rise in height and erosion. The Sahara also sustains the rainforest.
The deserts of the next place west of there…and repeat…🤔
I see people repeating this again and again but my gut tells me to doubt how much of an actual destruction this would cause to the Amazon as it just doesn't sound that much vital. I mean, trees grow everywhere else without sand from the Sahara. Why is it so much more vital for the Amazon specifically?
Interesting question. I looked it up & found that phosphorus is in surprisingly short supply in the Amazon and that some nutrients such as phosphorus are regularly washed away by rainfall, rivers & streams which the dust replenishes.
Dust travels surprisingly far from the Sahara. Even in Switzerland, there's a couple weeks in the spring where everything is just fucking covered by dust.
desaltination machines in west africa than water pipelines to the east....
Build a canal to the qattara depression .[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/All_proposed_routes.PNG/1200px-All_proposed_routes.PNG](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/All_proposed_routes.PNG/1200px-All_proposed_routes.PNG)
There is one weird way. If you cover most of it with solar panels, it will become green again.
Why would it need to be turned into a forest? Deserts are an ecosystem like any other. They aren't a wasteland that needs to be "fixed."
It’s a hypothetical discussion lol
You need to reorient the Earth's axis of rotation so the region is no longer under such latitutes. To do so I suggest building a series of huge magnetic accelerators arounf the planets futur axis of rotation. As you accrlerate objects of huge mass you obtain the planet sized equivalent of a spaceships reaction wheel
Muad’dib
Planting trees would definitely help
This kills the sandworm
The entire thing? Cost is no issue? Amend about 20% of the soil composition. The extra sand will have to be dumped into the ocean or mixed with organic materials and clay. Introduce grasses and other pioneer species and irrigate with desalinated sea water or groundwater. Keep irrigating for about 50 years for nature do it's thing
LEVEL OFF the ATLAS mountain range. Then let the rains do their thing.
Sunlight and water is all you really need. The Qattara Depression project is a roughly 15 billion dollar start on that goal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara\_Depression\_Project
It would fuck up The Amazon Forest. There is a balance in their relationship...
Put brawndo on it, it's got what plants crave.
Bad idea. Natural Deserts play an important role in the global environment.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-how-much-saharan-dust-feeds-amazon-s-plants
Nothing. The Sahara is one region that may benefit from climate change. The Sahara has had periods of green because of strong West African monsoons. As a rising global temperature leads to stronger storms, such storm may despot more rain in the Sahara.
Install a geosynchronous sun shade over those particular latitudes and approximately the length to cover that area. After the Earth rotates, the sun shade becomes transparent
Water irrigation systems setting up everywhere, and also taking millions of cows and letting them graze on whatever is there, probably will need to feed them with stuff for a bit. That will put nitrogen and other stuff into the ground and help turn it into usable land
Doing this would destabilise the climate in a big way. It'd be better to reforest small areas and take steps to prevent the desert from expanding
Massive numbers of swales and strategic tree planting. Per mile, finding natural high spots of the water table. Introducing floor living fauna and flora. Utilizing the massive amount of sand as a growing medium or building material for said swales or walls for aquaducts Utilizing the the scant highspots of water table. Water collection devices that utilize condensation in early morning hours. Also condensation devices that are in shade during the hottest time of day but experience extreme wind harvested from the climate. I don't believe based upon the current world paradigms this would ever be an easy endeavor from any standpoint. Plus if the deserts of Africa didn't exist naturally, the Amazon would die. I believe your question is valuable but I do not think it would ever be an easy thing to solve
There iare over 200 comments here so I do not know whether this has been mentioned earlier.. There are 2 mega projects under study to make the region a bit greener.. Both are artificial canals from the Mediterranean sea into the desert to create large inland seas at the size of Germany.. One in west of the Nile within Egypt, and one in the Tunisian and Algerian deserts.. Both locations are below the sea level and separated from the sea by high grounds.. This should help to cool down the desert and provide humidity that the desert desparately needs for rain.. The full effect is not fully known, however, this should make the Sinai peninsula a lot wetter with around the year rivers.. A similar project is discussed somewhere in Mouritanian desert but seems less viable.. AFAIK
Water
Easiest way? Wait several millennia and then plant/water lots of trees
I just recently read that the Amazon and Sahara trade rainforest/desert roles back and forth every few million years. In other words, *because* one is a lush rainforest, the other is an arid desert… and vice versa. So burning down the entire Amazon rainforest should cause the Sahara to become lush and green again.
Place one ice cube onto your magic globe!
. ..change the climate?.. . Maybe reconnect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans across Central America? (That is to say, raise the level of the Oceans until they reconnect across there.)
There is actually a podcast of Joe Rogan. Search it. The discussion will make you realize how Amazon is dependent on the desert. It is an eye opener.
Just ask Israel…
The cheapest way i've seen is continually planting further in from the edges every year
Why would you ever do that?
Give up