Here’s something a little off the beaten path. Pruned gives us a look at the Tarim Desert Highway that runs 552km from north to south across the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang. It connects the cities of Luntai and Minfeng on the northern and southern edges of the Tarim basin, but for “approximately 446km of the highway cross uninhabited areas covered by shifting sand dunes, making it the longest such highway in the world.”
(click for a larger view)
Pruned describes the “strategic” importance of the highway, but concentrates on the visually arresting “green belt” that has been constructed to protect the highway from the encroaching sand dunes.
An extensive irrigation network was laid down to sustain this artificial ecosystem, pumping water from underground reservoirs and then distributing it throughout. The water has a high saline content, nevertheless, this greenbelt has successfully taken root. The desert blooms.
(The midget forest of Tarim. Photo by George Steinmetz. Source.)
Of course, the government contends that the green belt has “improved” the ecology of the desert. Pruned scoffs at this claim, but hopes that
maybe their experiments are paving the way for food crops, not just ornamental ones, to be cultivated in deserts and watered with sea water. Considering that climate change will turn many places into deserts, these Tarim xeriscapers could offer us some helpful advice in adapting to our arid future.
Check out the post for more pictures.
1 response so far ↓
1 Greg // Jan 30, 2009 at 10:03 am
Those green belts look like a good idea to limit the amount of sand on the road, but they are desert scrub. A far cry from food crops which do not live on small amounts of salt water and need real soil, not desert sand.
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