Satellite image records: The Mu Us Desert is being "eradicated", and Chinese desert control workers have created miracles

The Mu Us Desert is one of the four major sandy lands in my country. In Mongolian, Mu Us means "bad water". As can be seen from the name, the Mu Us Desert should be classified as a barren land. However, if you If you go to the Mu Us Desert with the mentality of traveling to the desert, you will probably be disappointed, because when you come here, you will find that there is basically no desert here, and it will be replaced by lush green space. What is happening here?

The sky is full of flying sand and the desert is vast. This is people’s first impression of the desert. The Mu Us Desert is located at the junction of Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia, with a total area of ??42,200 square kilometers.

Looking back at the history of Qin, you will find that the Mu Us area is not a naturally formed desert. This vast land once hosted a prosperous civilization.

As early as the pre-Qin period, Qin Shihuang unified the world, and after Meng Tian forced back the Huns and occupied the Ordos Plateau, a large number of immigrants moved in to reclaim land and develop agriculture and animal husbandry.

During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the Xiongnu noble Helianbobo established the Great Xia Kingdom in the Mu Us area and made the capital Tongwancheng. The northern minority civilization continued for more than 500 years.

During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the development of agriculture allowed the Mu Us area to further expand the cultivated area. Affected by factors such as population growth and climate change, small areas of sandy land began to appear in the area. In the following 1,000 years, the area of ????the sandy land continued to expand, and by the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it was already a vast desert.

The "borrowing land to support the people" policy implemented in the middle and late Qing Dynasty encouraged people to cultivate a large amount of land, which led to the continuous expansion of the reclamation zone in the Mu Us area, and to a certain extent, it also exacerbated the desertification of the area.

Until liberation, the Mu Us Desert still experienced unstoppable desertification.

With the strengthening of human awareness of environmental protection, humans have realized that desertification has seriously affected ecology and the environment. Since the 1950s, my country has proposed to control sandy lands, and the Mu Us Desert was one of the sandy lands that focused on at that time. , in order to encourage local people to actively participate in desert control and afforestation, the policy of "all five wastelands are brought to each household, whoever creates them owns them, they will not change for a long time, and they are allowed to inherit", which greatly increased people's enthusiasm.

At that time, sand control and afforestation also involved crossing the river by feeling for the stones. Later, an effective method was gradually developed: the grass grid method.

People bury hay in the sand to form a 1 square meter square. The square can not only fix the sand in place, but also collect rainfall and fix part of the water in the square. As the plants grow inside the grid, the hay also provides fertilizer.

Through the unremitting efforts of the local people, the yellow sand turned into an oasis gradually began to take shape. Today, the forest coverage and vegetation coverage have reached 32.89% and 80% respectively. The Mu Us Desert is about to completely disappear from the territory of our country. .

According to the Mu Us model, can humans destroy all deserts?

Transforming the Mu Us Desert into an Oasis

In fact, according to the current management method of the Mu Us Desert, it is difficult to extend it to many natural deserts. After all, the Mu Us Desert was also a grassland. It has turned into sandy land under the dual action of humans and nature, and it is relatively easy to manage. However, like the Taklimakan Desert in my country, it has been formed for millions of years. It is extremely dry and has little rainfall. It is difficult to manage it into an oasis in the short term. Very big.

In fact, the transformation of the Mu Us Desert into an oasis is just a microcosm of China's afforestation. According to an article published by Nature in December 2019, "China and India lead the way to global greening" paper, many people are completely unaware that China has silently made a lot of contributions to the global environment.

According to satellite images released by NASA, in the past 30 years, the area of ??green space on the earth's surface has increased by 5%, of which China alone contributed 25%, India contributed 5%, and the remaining 70% are from other countries and regions.

China is sparing no effort to contribute to increasing green space in the world. However, many countries have rich forest resources, but they continue to cut them down, adding deserts to the earth.

Take the Amazon rainforest as an example. The Amazon rainforest is known as the lungs of the earth. The oxygen it produces accounts for one-tenth of the oxygen in the earth. However, in recent years, the tropical rainforest has faced two difficulties. , one is human deforestation, and the other is forest fires that will never be extinguished. The Amazon rainforest is being slowly cleared.

Indiscriminate deforestation and loss of vegetation

According to data released by INPE, the peak of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was in June, and it reached a new high for four consecutive months. In the first quarter, the Amazon rainforest climate total lost 3,609 square kilometers of rainforest, a 17% increase from last year.

It can be clearly seen from satellite images that much of the green in the tropical rainforest has begun to turn white, and South America is likely to evolve into Africa in the future. On the contrary, another scene has appeared in our country, that is, our country's desert areas, some areas have begun to turn green.

According to my country’s public data, my country’s forest coverage and stock volume have continued to grow for 30 consecutive years. Terrestrial nature reserves account for 18% of my country’s land area, and the forest coverage rate is also 23.04%. The forest’s The total area reached 220 million hectares.