China covered the ‘Sea of Death’ in trees. Here’s what happened.
China’s Taklamakan Desert was an unforgiving landscape. was is the operative word here as it is not so unforgiving anymore. The massive change is thanks to a decades-long bioengineering project that has transformed the once so-called “sea of death” into a lush green forest. According to recent research, it pulls tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
According to research published in January in PNAS, researchers from the University of California, Riverside found that since 1978, when China began building a large belt of trees around the desert’s outer edge as part of its “Great Green Wall” initiative, the effort to stop desert expansion and protect nearby farmland has had the unintended effect of becoming a major weapon against climate change. Thanks to data collected by NASA satellites, scientists found that the planted trees were now a major carbon sink, absorbing tons of the pollutants that humans pumped into the air.
Researchers observed increased vegetation growth correlated with a small but consistent decrease in atmospheric CO2, about 1 to 2 ppm lower in this area. This is not the kind of absorption you normally see in, for example, a rainforest. But it is a real, statistically significant absorption, made all the more wild by the fact that it was once one of the harshest environments on Earth.
China tried to cover the ‘sea of death’ in trees. Then things got weird.
It’s especially crazy when you consider that it was never supposed to do this. More than 95 percent of Taklamakan is hot sand. It was considered a biological dead zone. Just the idea that you could engineer even its fringes into a productive forest that helps filter out some of the mess that pumped into our atmosphere is an astonishing achievement.
Scientists say that even if the entire desert were turned into a forest, it would offset only a fraction of global emissions, absorbing only about 10 million tons of the 40 billion tons we release annually. There is also the annoying fact that it is a desert where there is a scarcity of water. The current forested ring is largely dependent on runoff from the surrounding mountains, which would not scale nicely if the desert forest expanded.
Overall, the project is proof that large environmental projects can work, even in the harshest environments. They are ultimately not solutions to our problems, but rather supplementary aids and the larger war of cutting CO2 emissions in the first place.
