In the past I've made posts about draining the Bohai Sea over 50 years to create new land the size of the UK, and diking/damming/draining Sundaland, to reclaim an amount of land equal to the Americas (over 2-4 centuries)
Here, I state that focusing on the Taklamakan desert (the oval depression in Xinjiang) specifically offers some advantages
-
the population of Xinjiang is already one of the fastest growing in China. So there's already a natural incentive to focus on this area.
-
The Taklamakan is huge, 180,000 sqmi. For reference, Germany is 140,000 sqmi, and Turkey is 300,000.
Takla is also basically the size of the North Chinese plain, but with one very important advantage. Note the BROWN color on the map, this means higher elevation (green is low). Takla is much higher than sea level.
The REASON for this highly elevated, but uniformly flat land, is the millennia of sediment deposits laid there from the mountain-fed rivers surrounding it. In other words, the Taklamakan desert should have some of the BEST and also MOST soil in the world (just add water)
- A secondary to the "mountain fed rivers" from above--the fact that it is surrounded by mountains on all sides guarantees moisture stability.
If you were to put water in the Sahara, it may dry up quickly, because of rain/wind patterns, because the Sahara is a very open space. This is not stable.
But if you were to put a bunch of water in the Taklamakan, any evaporated moisture would simply hit the surrounding mountains and condense (leeward and windward), returning back into the basin. Basically, it should be a "one-time fix".
The only issue is physically desalinating and moving that much water into the basin. But once that's done you'll basically have the most fertile and resilient green space on earth.
holy shit china is planning on actually doing this with TUNNELS
Chinese engineers plan 1,000km tunnel to make Xinjiang desert bloom (2017)
Chinese engineers are testing techniques that could be used to build a 1,000km tunnel – the world’s longest – to carry water from Tibet to Xinjiang, experts involved in the project say.
The proposed tunnel, which would drop down from the world’s highest plateau in multiple sections connected by waterfalls, would “turn Xinjiang into California”, one geotechnical engineer said.
China’s longest tunnel is the eight-year-old 85km Dahuofang water project in Liaoning province, while the world’s longest tunnel is the 137km main water supply pipe beneath the city of New York.
However, the Chinese government started building a tunnel in the centre of Yunnan province in August that will be more than 600km long, local media reported. Comprising more than 60 sections, each wide enough to accommodate two high-speed trains, it will pass through mountains several thousand metres above sea level in an area plagued by unstable geological conditions.
Researchers said building the Yunnan tunnel would be a “rehearsal” of the new technology, engineering methods and equipment needed for the Tibet-Xinjiang tunnel, which would divert the Yarlung Tsangpo River in southern Tibet to the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang. Downstream, in India, the river becomes the Brahmaputra, which joins the Ganges in Bangladesh.
The Tibetan Plateau stops the rain-laden Indian Ocean monsoon from reaching Xinjiang, with the Gobi Desert in the north and the Taklimakan Desert in the south leaving more than 90 per cent of the region unsuitable for human settlement.
However, the Taklimakan sits right at the foot of the Tibetan Plateau, which is known as the water tower of Asia. The more than 400 billion tonnes of water it releases each year – almost enough to fill Lake Erie in the United States – also feeds the source of other major rivers, including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong (known in China as the Lancang) and the Ganges.
The earliest proposals to divert water from Tibet to Xinjiang were made by Qing dynasty officials Lin Zexu and Zuo Zongtang in the 19th century. In recent decades, Chinese government branches, including the Ministry of Water Resources, have come up with engineering blueprints involving huge dams, pumps and tunnels.
“The water diversion project in central Yunnan is a demonstration project,” said Zhang, who has played a key role in many major Chinese water tunnel projects, including the one in Yunnan. “It is to show we have the brains, muscle and tools to build super-long tunnels in hazardous terrains, and the cost does not break the bank.”
The Yunnan tunnel and support facilities will take eight years to build at an estimated cost of 78 billion yuan (US$11.7 billion). It will carry more than three billion tonnes of water each year from northwestern Yunnan to the province’s dry centre and directly benefit more than 11 million people, according to the provincial government.
Zhang said China would definitely go ahead with the project one day. “In five to 10 years from now, the technology will be ready and the cost affordable, and the temptation of the benefits will be difficult to resist,” he said.
Zhang said the water shortage in Xinjiang was in many ways similar to that in California early in the 20th century. The Central Valley Project, devised in 1933, diverted water from northern California to the San Joaquin Valley, turning it into the world’s most productive agricultural region.
If you're diverting this much water from Tibet, would this not result in other ecosystems elsewhere lacking for water, potentially those other major rivers mentioned?
I can't find anything else about it so its possible they aren't actually planning on doing this, but yeah idk that sounds like it could be an enormous issue
I would be extremely pissed if I was India and was already facing looming water shortages due to thawing mountains.
that's why my post focused on water desal. It's going to take a lot longer, but it's the safest and most consequence-free method. The water just comes from the ocean, it's essentially a free lunch. I really don't like the idea of diverting rivers, even from wet places, because it will necessarily disturb something, that's just how it is.
However, this is the Brahmaputra, not the Ganges. It flows through Arunachal/Assam straight into Bangladesh, these are the wettest parts of continental India, wetter than the US northeast. It has the highest rainfall in the world, after the Amazon, Papua, and Borneo (excluding ocean rainfall obviously)
I still don't like it that much but it's not as bad as it sounds. I'd still rather they get desal to work somehow though
Another possibility is to dam the Bay of Bengal. It would save Bangladesh from flooding, and it would also create a huge freshwater reservoir with one of the highest rainfall rates in the world. It's also the shortest route water source to the Tarim Basin. Cons: the water pipeline would have to go through India, so geopolitics would have to change radically. Although maybe the benefits of the project could convince the parties to agree, idk.
you cant just build a dam 1000 km long across a kilometers deep ocean to turn literally the largest bay in the world into a freshwater lake
this is your brain on elon musk shit
you cant just build a dam 1000 km long
you mean 600 km
SKorea already built one that's 30 km, it's already been largely drained with recovered land being used for agriculture
The dike (not dam) would be 20x longer, and 10x deeper, true
China's economy is 20x bigger than Korea's, its population is 26x bigger, and cooperation from Indian countries would make this even more feasibledon't confuse actual geoengineering with "lul let's go to mars in underground tunnels because reasons"
the difficulty of such a project most definitely doesnt scale linearly, geoengineering is largely crank musk shit to pretend we dont have to stop using fossil fuels entirely
musk's tunnel shit is so many times more realistic than this proposal
musk’s tunnel shit is so many times more realistic than this proposal
how so?
the difficulty of such a project most definitely doesnt scale linearly,
of course it doesn't, when did I say otherwise? The manpower and combined capabilities of China + India + Bangladesh is also a little bit bigger than those of South Korea
Yeah, that's definitely something that might make someone with ongoing border tensions with their neighbour go to war with that neighbour
The goal, it seems, is to use the mountians to hold the water in after it's diverted. So in theory it would even out after a period of time.
I say in thwory because this is a super ambitious geoengineering peoject so while the science is sound who knows what will happen.
Team magma ass ideas, draining the oceans to create more land will just turn a bunch of the land inland into a desert. Look up the insane plan to drain the mediterranean, it would basically turn all of europe into a desert, and the newly exposed land into a disgusting salt flat.
Worst Korea did it in the 90s, successfully reclaimed 80 sqmi of land, + 80 sqmi of freshwater reservoir. Manhattan island is 23 sqmi
It's not a desert, the forests that were there are unchanged so far, and they already have agriculture and soccer fields (eh) and a country club golf course (ew)
if they had an actual government it could be used for better things, the point is they turned the ocean into land and freshwater. Obviously that wouldn't work in the Mediterranean because it gets far less rain, the little rain they DO get is getting shifted south by climate change, and land reclamation is totally different from water desalination
also none of this matters because getting a bunch of water into the Tarim Basin cannot turn anything into a desert, it's not even land reclamation, this feels like some backwards reasoning where "giving people wealth" makes them poor
Small scale land reclaimation in strategic areas can be done with little consequence if done correctly, but the examples you give are only tens of square kilometers, the Bohai Sea is 77 THOUSAND square kilometers, this is a drastically different scale and to think it would happen without really fucking up someplace else is quite arrogant.
The interiors of continents arent just dry by coincidence, you cant push back the sea and expect newly landlocked areas to stay the same.
Also the seafloor isnt very arable land, those small scale land reclaimations dumped new soil into the area to raise it, they didnt dam it off and drain the water to use the seafloor. If you were to dam off an entire sea it would definitely end up some disgusting uninhabitable salt cake.
the Bohai Sea is 77 THOUSAND square kilometers
ok but this post isn't about the Bohai sea
If you were to dam off an entire sea it would definitely end up some disgusting uninhabitable salt cake.
ok but this doesn't have anything to do with the Tarim Basin. Also no, not if that area naturally gets a high level of rainfall--or really any rainfall
what about making the entire turpan depression a freshwater lake
