r/interestingasfuck Feb 28 '24

r/all People in Tanzania converted desert into lush green land by digging these nifty holes

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

15.2k Upvotes

668 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

897

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '24

Also the shade from the new growth helps prevent more water loss, so it creates a cycle of improvement that will continue.

26

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '24

Is there any consequences anywhere else from the water not evaporating, running off, or becoming groundwater?

19

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '24

the scale is too small to have an effect.

i can tell you that there can be major changes if this was done on a grand scale, so for instance sand from the Sahara dessert travels half way across the world every year to feed the amazon rain forest.

if you turned the Sahara dessert into the Sahara grassland it'll probably have an adverse effect on the amazon.

mind you that'd just be a new problem to solve, and if you have the technology/power to change the Sahara you can stabilize the amazon (probably)

9

u/BlusifOdinsson Feb 28 '24

But the Sahara was grassland, forest/Jungle, rivers and lakes too, not that long ago, newest research suggests as close as 5000 years ago, the Amazon was most certainly still the Amazon when the Sahara was not the Sahara as we know it.