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
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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.
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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.
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.
ok but this post isn't about the Bohai sea
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