[ExI] Greening the Sahara

[Henrique Moraes Machado]

Dan> Any ideas on how to do this?
> An idea I had was to cover strategic swaths of it with dark material, 
> thereby causing its daytime temperature to rise causing the air to rise 
> faster pulling in more moist air from the costs. Once rainfall is higher, 
> it seems the greening would take care of itself.

The Sahara is a sand desert and it´s surface is highly mobile. The wind 
blows the sand and the dunes move a lot. I think that any dark material 
covering the sand would be quickly covered back with sand by the blowing 
winds.

Here´s a thought. And this can be a complete nonsensical idea (almost 
certainly is). I don´t know how deep is the sand layer and what lies 
beneath, but what about digging big potholes (too bad we can´t use 
thermonuclear blasts to do this, because of the residual radiation) and fill 
them with seawater. These potholes evenly distributed across the desert 
could provide a lot of water for evaporation.