That title, "the Sahara forest" just cracks me up, in part because of an old lumberjack joke. Here's the version at Reddit:
An old man applies for a job as a woodcutter,
but the boss doesn't think he's fit enough. He tells the boss he is able to cut down any tree in a single swing.To prove this, he goes outside, hits a five foot tree with his axe, and it falls over. The boss is impressed. The old man then repeats this with a ten foot tree. Then a thirty foot tree. Finally, he takes his axe up to an 80 foot redwood, swings, and the giant tree comes tumbling down.
The boss is amazed, and asks the man how he learned to do that. The man says "I practiced in the Sahara forest."
"Don't you mean the Sahara desert?" The boss asks.
"Well yes," says the old man, "that's what they call it now."
Also at Reddit:
The CEO of IKEA was just elected president in Sweden.
He should have his cabinet together by the end of the week.
Now that you know I am easily amused, onward. Two separate projects. First up, from the BBC (undated but apparently 2020):
Nanoclay: the liquid turning desert to farmlandInspired by the secret to the Nile Delta’s fertility, engineers are using a concoction of clay, water and local soils to grow fruits in the desert.
In March this year, just as countries across the world went into Covid-19 lockdown, a remarkable transformation neared completion in a corner of the United Arab Emirates. In just 40 days, a once barren plot of sand in this landlocked desert nation had become littered with ripe, sweet watermelons swelling under the Arabian sun.For a country that has to import 90% of its fresh produce, it was an extraordinary milestone. The dry, inhospitable Arabian desert had been turned into a lush fruit farm with the simple addition of clay and water.
Except it wasn’t so simple – these melons were only possible with the help of liquid “nanoclay”, a soil recovery technology whose story began 1,500 miles (2,400km) west and two decades ago.
In the 1980s parts of the Nile Delta in Egypt stopped flourishing. Famed for its fertility, it had been a reliable place to farm for thousands of years despite its proximity to the arid desert. Its productivity had allowed the ancient Egyptians to divert their energies from subsistence farming to developing a powerful civilisation that produced such cultural feats that they are famed around the world thousands of years later. Yet, despite supporting communities in the region over the millennia, in the space of just 10 years or so, that fecundity faded.
Every year in late summer the Nile would flood, expanding onto the Egyptian delta plains before receding again. As scientists began to investigate what had caused the drop in land fertility, they discovered that those floodwaters carried with them minerals, nutrients and crucially, clay particles from the East African drainage basin that feeds the Nile, and deposited them across the delta lands. The clay gave the soil both its resilience and fertility. But where had it gone?
Rewind 10 years to the building of the Aswan Dam across the Nile in southern Egypt during the 1960s. This remarkable 2.5 miles (4km) wide structure was built to generate hydroelectricity and regulate flooding so farming could become more manageable and predictable. But it also stopped all that good stuff flowing downstream. A decade without this annual top-up, and all the fertility in the delta soils had been used up....
....MUCH MORE
And from Jordan and Tunisia's Sahara Forest Project:
The Sahara Forest Project in 10 sentences
