The Sahara Desert Used to Look Like This…And May Again
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2022
- Thousands of years ago, the Sahel region of Africa was a green, lush, tropical paradise. The Great Green Wall initiative is on a mission to restore that greenery in that region across the entire continent.
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The Great Green Wall is an epic project that aims to grow an 8,000 kilometer belt of vegetation across the entire width of the African continent. If completed, it would be three times larger than the Great Barrier Reef, and be the largest living “structure” on the planet. But can this massive geo-engineering project transform the landscape into the fertile, tropical place it once was?
So here’s the thing: this part of Africa is heating up. Particularly in the Sahel, which sits between the southern edge of the world’s largest hot desert, the Sahara, and humid savannas to the south. Vegetation is scarce in this semi-arid belt of land, and the U.N. has identified it as a hotspot for climate change.
Temperatures in the Sahel region are increasing 1.5 times faster than the rest of the world, and the Sahara desert is now 10% larger than it was in 1920. Periodic drought, deforestation, and unsustainable agricultural practices have reduced the productivity of the Sahel, causing desertification. This has led to massive food insecurity and displacement of people in the region.
And with temperatures expected to be 3-5°C warmer by 2050, these problems are projected to get worse.
But not all is lost! Remember when we said the Sahara used to be green? Well, that was about 11,500 years ago. Back then there was grass, lakes, and animals like hippos and antelopes! Dubbed the African Humid Period, also known as the “Green Sahara,” this era was the result of intense West African monsoons, which were stronger and brought more summer rainfall than today.
#SaharaDesert #Sahara #Africa #Algeria #ClimateChange #Environment #Desertification #Seeker
Read More:
Africa’s ‘Great Green Wall’ shifts focus to hold off desert
www.politico.com/news/2021/11...
The project called the Great Green Wall began in 2007 with a vision for the trees to extend like a belt across the vast Sahel region, from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, by 2030. But as temperatures rose and rainfall diminished, millions of the planted trees died.
Could the Sahara ever be green again?
www.livescience.com/will-saha...
Sometime between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended, the Sahara Desert transformed. Green vegetation grew atop the sandy dunes and increased rainfall turned arid caverns into lakes. About 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers) of Northern Africa turned green, drawing in animals such as hippos, antelopes, elephants and aurochs (wild ancestors of domesticated cattle), who feasted on its thriving grasses and shrubs.
Africa’s ‘Great Green Wall’ could have far-reaching climate effects
www.sciencenews.org/article/a...
To investigate those possible impacts, Pausata created high-resolution computer simulations of future global warming, both with and without a simulated wall of plants along the Sahel. Against the backdrop of global warming, the Great Green Wall would decrease average summertime temperatures in most of the Sahel by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius.
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You would have to change the name because Sahara means Desert so the Sahara Forest would be the Desert Forest
I’m pretty sure a climate scientist that was on JRE just spoke about this saying something like every few million years or something like that the Sahara naturally changes back and forth between jungle and desert.
Yes, sahara climate is partially controlled by the tilt of the earth and where the sun hits the continent.
However, scientists have evidence that over grazing from early civilizations likely wiped out the smaller plant life that should have survived between the periods to buffer the impact on the ecocsystem between orbital transitions. It's worse than usual as a result. No plants means that the dirt is just getting hot in the day and cold at night, and the water has no where to go but get dried up. By growing a bunch of plants along the border, more water and sunlight will be naturally retained in the soil overtime.
Yes it's not the sun. That has very little effect on temperature.
I might be wrong, but wasn't it much hotter during the age of the dinosaurs, and it's typically depicted as covered in jungles globally?
That's 300 - 60 million years ago, at that time the Sahara was part of a bigger continent and was on a other location on earth. In this video they are taking about tens of thousands of years ago so there's a big difference!
People have many plans to greening the Sahara or making seas or lakes in the desert for decades.
This is sounds like how my car insurance sales person preach to me. They present everything with big smiles and sweet happy tone of talking.
A lot of women sound like that. If a guy sounds like that though, RUN.
I'd buy so much car insurance
Hav u fort its coz they see easy meat😍
She's a serial killer😳
Why the eff did I watch this .I'm gonna see her face every time I watch chucky or Friday 13th.every monster us now gonna have her face on it.lol.
how about stopping the deforestation of Amazon and congo basin for Timber and starting reforestation which will obviously have a greater impact and easier solution
Why not both?
@@Sedna063 the proposed method in the video is costly, will have a greater carbon footprint, and could have unforseen results
Every home and business needs to install are rain water collection system with water storage tanks.
Aquifer storage and recovery. Or, in Spanish, Recarga artificial de acuíferos. Two Wikipedia articles with the same defect, the first dealing with the Anglo Saxon experience, the other mostly with the Spanish one, but both talking about the techniques used to revive wells and water springs that now are drying. Worth a look, worth a video.
In Chile, a project of that technology has proven fruitful.
Nice video.
But won’t this affect the Amazon rainforest?
Since I’m pretty sure it gets minerals and other stuff from the Sahara desert via wind
They mention this at 04:00
It actually would impact in a positive way allowing it to thrive. It’s mentions 4:00 , the dust from the Sahara actually reduces fertility in the Amazon..but yes a lot of variables…could have unpredictable effects…
Thanks for helping me with my homework❤❤
cool thanks
Nice
I can watch you speaking 24/7
Make Sahara Great Again
Where is my green MSGA cap?
Build a green wall
We should make a canal from the Atlantic to the Red Sea
It's called the Mediterranean.
Things like Time traveling in one Life...
As an arabic speaker (it's my first language) I cringe whenever I hear people say the "Sahara desert" - it's just the sahara.. otherwise you're saying "desert desert".. it has the same energy as saying "the lunar moon" 😂
I never knew that
Lol ,if only people asked what it meant, quite a boring name just desert
@@mikeoxsmal8022 I mean, it's a big desert - it spans an entire continent. It's the same way the moon is just called the moon - it's the most important one from our perspective.
@@quintecence I Know That but still is a boring name
There are lots of other deserts which are called desert in the local language too. I would be all on board for everyone just remembering they mean desert, but until then they’ll always say “desert” afterwards as a reminder. Just like ATM machine, PIN number. (I used to get so mad about “PIN number” as a teen… now I’ve sublimated my frustration into amusement/bemusement instead….) Tsunami means harbour wave and you still see “tsunami wave” in English a lot… though less-so recently. So perhaps the sahara can slowly drop the redundancy too. But I doubt if I’ll live to see all the deserts whose name means desert dropping the redundancy in how they’re discussed in English >.>
Diverting the Nile at Cairo seems to be the best solution. Divert it through tunnels to the Qattara depression and then extend it westwards. The Dutch have done a similar project.
Would be a very bad idea. The Nile supplies the Nile Delta. If the water isn’t flowing the sea water would flow in place - making the most fertile Egyptian region infertile
Except that the Nile is being damed from the south in Ethiopia.
The sahara desert is living testimony to the ever presentness of climatic cbanges.
The climate is never still but continually changes.
Humans interact positively with the planet as we are part of it.
apparently (check this pls) the Sahara has been a green oasis many times according to another science video I saw. The fellow explained the entire northern hemisphere heats up and cools down periodically like a yo-yo because of the altering penetration of the sun's energy depending on the always changing axis of earth. Either way that's a LOT of heat.
0:20 Mycelium would like to have a chat.
โต โต โต 😊
5 million channel has only 25k views in 3 days? weird...
I hope they don't completely reforest the desert, there's some cool critters in there y'know (I don't really think they would anyway)
The Sahara Desert covers 8% of the earths landmass and is about the size of China. Making even one of those 8 percent go green would take a many many years and requires exceptional technological and political advances. It's just effing enormous- it really is something you can see from space and you don't have to squint either!
I like this host's voice and facial expressions.
Lov from India 👌🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳💚💚💚🇮🇳🇯🇵🇧🇩
Still waiting for someone to start the Qattara Depression canal project!
Hello
well that sector is very hot, if they do that would be amazing
King Canute lives !
Let's hope that Mali leaving G5 Sahel doesn't screw things up…
When I can't see your hands gesticulation, I imagine that you're playing drums or guitar
What?
Was not only 5000 years ago the Sahara was green.
Orbital shimmy shake?
Hey, presenter, is your overall presentation demeanour and face all an act, or are you really just so dang *bright and beautiful* , huh?
5mil subs 24k views after 3 days
Lmao
So to make one part of the planet better. They destroy another part of it.
This is so sweet, is somebody really thinking we can stop Climatechange with a few trees in the desert!?
they don't bother to stop destruction of amazon while it's water there (still), and planting trees in the desert with almost nonexistent water it's the "solution" !? wth !? it sounds more like an attempt of fake positivity and bamboozle attempt for comfortable news for going back to sleep and tv drooling. besides the "justification" of funds or money washing opportunity.
You need to have a word with Mother Nature first!..Ty for the info!
Only replete with his knowledge procured over many a years, and bequeathed with the enlightenment one has when cobblestone displays it's beauty to that of a city with history equal to his own. We are creative people and shall our intrinsic value give extrinsic measurements of pecuniary worth.
Shall the winds of history flow always in our favour.
Sahara
There are too many people on this planet
When I was in college I wrote my non-western civ paper on the desertification of Africa. Glad to see this project is happening!
"This could have serious consequences for the climate and many unintended effects around the globe..."
2 seconds later: "But we're doing anyway lol" 🤦♂️
Audio is out of sync
The audio sounds terrible!
Growing trees in deserts would be devastating. Albedo = refelectivity. Deserts reflect a lot. Snow reflects a lot. Trees absorb a lot. We lose all the ice caps and deserts are our only source of light reflection. It seems counter intuitive, but foresting our deserts is a waste of water and will just make things hotter. Maybe we should just stop driving cars and dumping greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, but instead we're wasting everyone's time with ideas like this.
Yeah lets just stop driving cars and get nothing done since we'll all be walking...
There will be more clouds if shrubs and trees are planted. Also, more water will be retained in the ecosystem instead of flowing away, which can make air cooler. Trees actually provide cooler shade on a sunny day
Prophet Muhammad year ~630 prophesied: this dessert will ONCE AGAIN become gush green before the hour comes.
S.A.N.D
So we’re gonna cover the Sahara with trees so that we can never uncover the ruins there?
Mysterious
Hopefully climate change can be changed by this inspiration..
Population needs to be in balance with jobs, resources, nature and the environment. Having a bigger population in any country than the country can support makes no sense. Access to food, water, shelter and jobs should guide population levels. The worlds population is still expected to add another billion people to feed, clothe and produce pollution.
Wouldn't this greatly damage the Amazon forest, however?
There is a theory that the Amazon forest uses nutrients that are carried from the Sahara desert across the Atlantic Ocean, by winds, to South America, and is one of the things that make the Amazon forest such a rich place in regards to its biome.
If you convert the desert into a lush forest, can't this damage the Amazon forest?
Have you seen the Amazon recently? It’s not what it once was. Is the great green wall is successful, it’ll be the largest forest.
The Amazon rainforest has been largely unchanged for million of years, as shown by soil samples. The Sahara desert is relatively new, only forming 6000 years ago (suspected to be a result of humans raising goats in the area, cleaning the region of any vegetation and cause a spiral of climate devastation). The minerals that cross the Atlantic and settle in the Amazon makes up such an infinitesimally small amount of variability in it's "lushness" that it's far from anything worth concerning over.
start a rainforrest in the sahara
the amazonians are burning it down anyway so who cares, clearly they do not
Watch the video
Yes
I can see that in the long term not being sustainable due to current changes in earth's atmospheric dynamics. A very human solution to something much MUCH more complicated than that.
A shame humans are still at an extremely primitive state.
ok and
Oh yeah, lets just plant trees without having water nearby
Are humans responsible for the Sahara desert? Seems like the longest estimated for modern humans gives us 100,000 years to do it, and if it was only 11,000 years ago that the region was green, that coincides with documented civilisation. We have made dust bowls since.
Is it an unreasonable hypothesis?
this was tried and failed, however it is occurring in nearby areas due to the increase of CO2
🤘🏻🇺🇲👍
You know we're screwed when the only realistic plan to arrest desertification is essentially the first real geoengineering project that mankind would have to nail perfectly. Unfortunately we have a greater chance of middle east peace than mankind coming together on a project outside of the western world, in Africa 🤣
Digging a canal from the ocean to the Sahara would only have positive affect
Salt water? Really? The Mediterranean is a sea, not a lake.
@@MariaMartinez-researcher salt water still has life
@@drstone3418 Yeah? Try growing plants with salt water. Tell me how far you get.
@@ClockworkGearhead ocean plants or plants going from the moister
First of all Sahara means Desert so, the name must have been given after how it is...and what was before must have been in another name...
Just some feedback for the video, more talking and less visual cues and diagrams is pretty boring.
Some time ago I’ve heard that greening the Sahara would be bad for earth’s overall temperature , as the desert reflects most of the sunlight, while a green area would attract the sun. Is this true?
Hardly. If it was painting the barren land dark, of course, but having trees were there were trees *before,* would raise the temperature higher than is raising now, with increasing greenhouse gases emissions and decreasing jungle and woodlands?
Also, trees aren't just there standing. They hold the dirt preventing floods, produce compostable leaves, are the basis to whole ecosystems, produce oxygen, capture carbon, and, produce humidity, increasing rain in the sector.
The Amazon isn't a jungle because it is rainy there, it is rainy because there's a jungle there. The current Brazilian policy of substituting jungle with soy, cattle, mining, etc., is already causing a decrease of rains.
So, it would be interesting you checked the place where you heard that greening the Sahara would increase the planet's temperature. The project doesn't intend to make the whole Sahara green, but to stop the desert from growing even more.
Really? Do you realize deserts are the some of the hottest places on the planet? No wonder you "heard"....!!
@@sicfxmusic That deserts can get very hot is certain. Of course, I do not doubt it. But at the same time, this has nothing to do with earth's overall climate. The bright sand reflects most of the incoming heat, while something dark, like a forrest, would attract it and keep hit. At night, it can get very cold in Sahara. This won't be the case, if it would be turned to a forest. Another argument against it is, that the dust of the Sahara gets blown all over the world and is a crucial fertilizer to many plants around the globe. The Amazon rain forrest might shrink without that mineral charge. The global biospheres are all interdependent and changing one can cause an unwanted domino effect. There is no shortcut, we must reduce our emissions.
@@sicfxmusic yes the Sahara can get very hot… during the day, in the night however it can get pretty cold, because the sand hardly holds on the heat
@@sicfxmusic deserts arent deserts becauae they are hot but rather a lack of precipitation. Even antartica, the coldest place on earth, is a desert.
One thing that might present an issue is increase of malaria and other diseases….I am all for more vegetation but one must have this in mind as well….
I think this would be an excellent presentation, ruined by inane background music.
Am I the only one who gets bothered when I hear someone say "The Sahara Desert"?
with global warming happening, it could look like that again....................
As soon as vids like this mention 2050 or even 2030 - you are dreaming - but nice try 👍
More Broll, less u
Too bad this project has already been deckared a failure years ago.
Pretty dumb idea if you ask me
the west is decertifying Sahara and then the west is showing mercy by providing some supply............look at ur electricity consumption and co2 emission from vehicles, compare that to africas
then u may understand why Sahara decertifying.
This is a bad idea, mostly because the desertification of the Sahara had nothing to do with human action, rather simply, it has to do with the axis of the Earth's rotation or something. That, and we'll get a green Sahara in about 46,000 years. Who knows the potential consequences of such a massive project far down the line?
This has got to big the biggest grift yet! Lmao. I bet Hunter Biden and Greta Thunberg teamed up on this one. The shear stupidity in this project is too much, I just can’t. 😂 And then you hear of the $14 BILLION spent on plating trees without proper soil or even water supply. Somebody definitely got a new mansion (in an actual paradise) and a shiny Bugatti all paid for by the rainbow flavored hair crowd.
Instead of messing with nature just leave it all alone the climate on the earth has always been changing and will forever change stop trying to fix something that’s not broken the earth is going to do its thing on its own time
bUT WE ARE AFFECTING IT NEGATIVLY IN SO MANY WAYS (Reverse the caps, sorry.)
We can affect that change. We ARE affecting that change. Would you just sit idly by while the Earth transformed into a state uninhabitable for us?
Only replete with his knowledge procured over many a years, and bequeathed with the enlightenment one has when cobblestone displays it's beauty to that of a city with history equal to his own. We are creative people and shall our intrinsic value give extrinsic measurements of pecuniary worth.
Shall the winds of history flow always in our favour.
Can you write this in a different way. I am having hard time understanding this.
Only replete with his knowledge procured over many a years, and bequeathed with the enlightenment one has when cobblestone displays it's beauty to that of a city with history equal to his own. We are creative people and shall our intrinsic value give extrinsic measurements of pecuniary worth.
Shall the winds of history flow always in our favour.