Как Саудовская Аравия Вырастила Леса Посреди Пустыни

In 2016, on a rocky slope thirty kilometers south of Mecca, a man shut off the water. For seven years, he had grown trees here using drip irrigation—in a place that receives around 70 millimeters of rainfall a year. The money ran out, the irrigation had to be turned off, and the question came down to one simple thing. Would the trees survive or not? They survived. And what was discovered beneath their roots explains why an entire country began seriously talking about ten billion new trees. In this video, we examine how forests are appearing in the driest country on the planet—and why the first attempt to make the desert green nearly ended in disaster. What's inside: Why wheat circles in the Arabian Desert were visible from space—and why they had to be shut down What fossil water is and how much of it was pumped out in a single generation How trees stop moving dunes without drinking a single extra liter Why the project near Mecca first built 15 kilometers of stone terraces and only then planted the first tree How a desert capital waters millions of trees without using a drop of fresh groundwater Why mangrove trees drink water twice as salty as the sea and stay alive What happened to the ancient mountain forest in the southwest of the country while mass plantings were taking place on the plains And what was found beneath the sand of the northern desert, forcing us to understand the word “desert” differently This material was compiled from publicly available scientific and official sources. Data on fossil water and the wheat program come from publications by the U.S. Geological Survey and imagery from the Landsat program, as well as peer-reviewed studies on the water resources of the Arabian Peninsula. Information about the Al-Ahsa Oasis is based on UNESCO documents and the Guinness World Records database. The history of stabilizing the sands in the 1960s was reconstructed from a dissertation defended at Michigan State University in 1976. Data on the land-restoration project near Mecca comes from the project’s own reports and interviews with its director. Figures for the national greening program, mangrove plantings, and the greening of the capital are drawn from official statements by the relevant ministry, the National Center for Vegetation Cover Development, and the city commission. Information about juniper dieback is based on field surveys published in peer-reviewed journals. Discoveries on the floor of an ancient lake in the Nefud Desert are described in an article in Science Advances and materials from the Max Planck Institute. Estimates of groundwater reserves and the time until their depletion vary among different research groups. If you're interested in how engineering works where nature sets strict limits, subscribe to the channel. Tell us in the comments which side you're on. Some believe that greening the desert is saving the land from turning completely into sand. Others are convinced it's an expensive green facade covering up dwindling water supplies. #simplescience #desert #engineering #ecology #geology #SaudiArabia #water #documentary