First off, the water would need to be desalinated or you would ensure the land would be unsuitable for farming (and really growing anything) for generations.
Also, sand doesn’t hold water. In fact, when planting trees and other bushes, if you want more drainage, you typically add rocks and sand.
Second, most plants need non-sandy soil to grow on (palm trees and other beach bushes and plants aside) though those grow in areas that have lots of rain already.
Thirdly, the soil will need bacteria to aid the plants in obtaining nutrients and breaking down waste (dead leaves, dead plantlife, etc).
The way to do it is to look at a couple of projects that are fighting against desertification in Africa:
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The Great Green Wall https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-green-wall/
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Using compostable waste to fertilize soil https://jstories.media/article/greening-the-desert-with-trash
You’ll notice that many of these projects start at the edges of deserts. Instead of relying on pumping water onto sandy soil (which would just suck up the water as sand doesn’t hold water that well) they focus on extending the non desert ecosystem onto the desert so that the new soil will absorb water better, the weather over the newly terraformed area will be less dry, and it will eventually be self sustaining.
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Saltwater doesn’t revive soil, it kills it.
The sheer volume of water that moves through even a small creek is shockingly massive.
The amount of water held in an aquifer is astounding.
The soils required for agriculture and general growing plants (ones that hold water and nutriet) specifically are lacking or depleted in deserts.
So… it’s a literal pipe dream.
Aquifers! Aquifers all over the land!
You’re wrong about the soil nutrient content in deserts. Or at least it’s not a blanket statement like that since some deserts are essential in providing soil nutrients to other parts of the world through wind.
Deserts can have lots of minerals and the sand/dust is carried on the wind. Theses are important but the desert won’t be high in nitrogen and carbon.
Oh the nutrients are there, the composition of the soil is what is lacking so those nutrients don’t infiltrate into water well so plants can’t access them. It’s mostly sand and clay, lacking in silts for proper loams and organic matter.
Also there’s usually a ton of salt in desert sand that doesn’t help.
Because that’s how you make salt lakes. Instead of reviving them, it would kill off the last remaining traces of life.
In addition to what everyone else already said, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to pump water uphill.
Removed by mod
I wouldn’t quit your day job… the career in stand up doesn’t seem like it’s going places…
Upvoted solely because this is the sort of unhinged comment that I missed about the old internet
Why? They have dump trucks and dams in Africa, you know. Or did you think this was before Africa became the world’s fastest-growing and biggest market for cell phones?
Even as a slave, the cost of a human work is magnitudes above the cost of using a pump with petrol. A slave may be able to output ~1kWh per day, that’s mostly a few 10s of cents anywhere. Can you feed anyone on that?
Were you planning on desalinating the seawater first? Because that requires an immense amount of energy to do, and we haven’t even touched on the topic of the energy required to move water from one place to another.
If you weren’t planning on desalinating the seawater, then the salt will definitely destroy whatever nutrients the desert sand might have had, rendering seawater irrigation completely pointless.
I remember somebody pointing out that one of the interesting projects that would become available with the development of Fusion energy would be large scale terraforming of deserts. The technology we essentially already have, the problem is that the current technology is incredibly energy inefficient, but if we don’t care about energy efficiency, because we essentially have more than we will ever know what to do with, we can just go ham.
more than we will ever know what to do with
That’ll last maybe five minutes
Just think of how many monkey jpgs we could make with that kind of energy!
Two?
Saltwater destroys soil and vegetation instead of facilitating its existence. And you’d need to add better soil and the means to produce more fertile soil (plant species that shed leaves often and have nitrogen-fixing microbes in their roots).
But such water would make rain in the surrounding area more likely and common, if it can be sustained. For instance, I hear there are plans to re-create an inlet in northern Libya that used to exist but dried up when it was cut off from the Mediterranean by an earthquake that pushed up a natural dam some 6000 years ago or something, so the surroundings can become greener. (But given the current flooding of roughly that same area, doing so would be a terrible idea for the people who now live in that below-sea-level area.)
Better yet, use Brawndo!
It got what plants crave, electrolytes
What even are electrolytes? Does anyone know!?
It’s what plants crave duh
History teaches us that when we mess with the ecosystem, something dies/extinct
Project plowshare 2.0
Why would you want to?
For more plant life/oxygen, and absorption of greenhouse gases.
Because that would turn the delicious deserts into disgusting salty porridge. I’m terribly sorry.
I was thinking that a solution to rising sea levels could be a canal from the Atlantic to that part of the Sahara that’s below sea level.
You may be underestimating how much water is in the ocean
The Sahara is fairly big, and a new Sahara Sea should pick up some of the water that otherwise would have ended up over, say, Venice or Miami.
The mariana trench is also below sea level lol
If the ice caps keep melting, we’re going to see what happens! In real time
A lot of deserts get a fresh water pulse occasionally, and things spring back to life. If you take that away it destroys more ecology. You’re better off making multilevel greenspace in the cities.
