[ExI] Greening the Sahara

[Dan]

--- On Thu, 7/16/09, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> > ...On Behalf Of Dan
> > Subject: [ExI] Greening the Sahara
> > 
> > Any ideas on how to do this?
> > 
> > An idea I had was to cover strategic swaths of it with
> dark 
> > material... Any thoughts on this? Dan
> 
> Why not the tried and true pipes and pumps?  It seems
> a shame the Nile dumps
> all that fresh water into the sea.  We could use every
> drop of it, similar
> to the way North America uses all the water that flows down
> the Colorado.
> Very little of that makes it to the sea.

Not a bad idea, though I'm not sure how much of this would help and from a practical standpoint, the Nile output would probably best be used only at the far eastern parts of that desert. Also, it involves a large infrastructure, whereas my idea could just be taking an area where wind is low -- maybe a rockier portion of the desert -- and merely dropping some soot or similar dark material on it. An alternative could be to burn something smoky near the region -- where the exhaust will locally raise temperature to cause the air to rise kicking off the convection process.

Also, I had a similar idea regarding using the Meditarranean waters. IIRC, Libya currently does some desalination of these waters for its use, but it also draws a lot from aquifers under the desert. These are not being replenished -- so, in a sense, the Libyans are draining the aquifers. I thought a huge desalination project could be started to replenish the aquifers and provide water for desert communities, etc. (Naturally, the idea could be used anywhere where a sea is nearby a desert.)

Back to my idea, locally heating the air would draw in water from the Atlantic and Mediterranean and probably even from sub-Saharan Africa. (Coupled with flooding the East African Rift valley, maybe some of the waters could come from that area as well.)

Regards,

Dan