How are Kubuqi and Mu Us deserts managed? Can Taklimakan be successfully managed?

In recent years, with China's investment in environmental protection, the forest coverage rate in China has greatly increased, from less than 9% in the initial stage of reform and opening up to 12% and now to 22.96%. Contrary to the increasing forest coverage rate, the desert area in China is declining, of which the Mu Us Desert has completely disappeared from the territory of China, and the Kubuqi Desert has been successfully managed by more than 60%, and its complete disappearance is just around the corner.

With the success of desert control, many people will be optimistic about desert control and think that China can destroy all deserts in a short time. Is this correct?

Will the desert disappear? According to the different causes of desert formation, desert can be divided into two types. One is the desert formed by geographical conditions, such as: Taklimakan desert; The other is a desert formed by man-made destruction. What we can do now is to restore the desert formed by human destruction.

Take Kubuqi Desert as an example. In the past, Kubuqi Desert was a famous Shuofang City in Han Dynasty. At that time, the water plants were rich and the terrain was dangerous. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty built Shuofang City here and moved from the mainland100000 people to settle down. However, with the wars of the past dynasties, coupled with the endless grazing and excessive reclamation of farmland by local people, soil erosion is serious and vegetation is reduced here. The decrease of vegetation will lead to the increase of extreme weather. Over time, the local desertification continued, and Shuofang City was gradually abandoned by people, and finally degenerated into a desert area.

In the past, the Kubuqi Desert pushed tens of meters of sediment to the banks of the Yellow River every year, which led to an increase in the sediment carrying capacity of the Yellow River. At the lower reaches of the Yellow River, due to the flat terrain and slow water flow in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, at this time, the sediment of the Yellow River continues to accumulate, and finally an overground channel is formed, which is very easy to burst its banks. Therefore, in ancient China, the Yellow River flood was a serious problem faced by every dynasty.

After the founding of New China, the Kubuqi Desert is close to Beijing, so that the Beijing area often suffers from sandstorms tens of meters high, and the whole city is filled with yellow sand.

In order to protect the Yellow River and restore the local ecological environment, China began to control the Kubuqi Desert, Mu Us Desert and other desert areas in the last century.

The disappearance of the desert can obviously improve the local water cycle, increase the number and species of local organisms and enrich the local ecological chain. After the successful desert control around the Yellow River, the sediment concentration of the Yellow River will also be significantly reduced, making the number of floods in the Yellow River less and less.

In a word, desert control is a good thing for our country, and there is no harm.

The difficulty of desert control is water shortage. In order to restore the local ecological environment, experts and local farmers suffered a lot. At first, they planted trees by deep digging, but later it was found that the survival rate of deep digging was very low, only about 10 trees could survive, and deep digging was more destructive to the local environment, which would make the water vapor in deep soil evaporate into the atmosphere.

Later, it was found that planting trees in glass bottles filled with water had a higher survival rate. To put it simply, put the tree in a glass bottle filled with water. When the plants grow, the roots will overflow from the glass bottle and take root in the depths.

In order to prevent the wind and sand from moving, the locals also made cubes out of crop straws and plant straws, and fixed the sand inch by inch in the cubes. Another purpose of this straw grid is that if there is rain in the local area, the rain will not be lost or evaporated, but will be fixed in the grid, and plants can grow here as long as there is enough water.

Later, with the appearance of black technology, people planted trees with high-pressure water guns. In this way, the survival rate of trees is high and the damage to the local area is small.

In order to protect the fruits of planting trees and grass as much as possible, people are forbidden to dig Nostoc flagelliforme and licorice regularly.

Due to various measures, China has successfully controlled many deserts, but the probability of sandstorms in northern cities of China has obviously decreased, and there have not even been sandstorms in recent years.

Hard-to-eliminate Desert Although China has more experience in sand control, we have no way to make the Taklimakan Desert disappear from our territory at present. Because the geographical position of Taklimakan desert is really bad.

Taklimakan Desert is located in the inland area of China, surrounded by mountains on three sides. The high mountains will hinder the entry of water vapor, which makes the rainfall here very small. Although there is meltwater around the Taklimakan Desert, it is mainly composed of sand with very low specific heat capacity, so the temperature is extremely high at noon, which will accelerate the evaporation of water vapor, so even if there is meltwater, it is difficult to flow through it.

More importantly, meltwater is also very important to the surrounding ecological areas. If we introduce some meltwater into Taklimakan desert, it will lead to desertification in other areas due to lack of water. Therefore, it is very difficult and costly to control the Taklimakan desert at present, and it is difficult for us to eliminate it at this stage.