The University of Maryland’s Eugenia Kalnay wants to turn a massive portion of the world’s largest desert into a solar farm. Unlike desert sand, solar panels excel at absorbing the sun’s heat, warming the surfaces they rest upon. With the help of windmills, the additional heat could rise into the atmosphere, triggering rainfall and creating the conditions for things to grow again. The Sahara has grown by 10% since 1920. And we’ll need as much arable land as we can get to feed a growing global population.
Did you know…
[INDENT]"Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater.[/INDENT]
[INDENT]They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.[/INDENT]
[INDENT]The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource."[/INDENT] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17775211
So why can’t you use solar power to irrigate huge tracts of land?
http://www.oxfordpresents.com/ms/nance/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/02/ch14_fig14d.jpg
Figure 14D: Ancient Rivers in the Sahara.
Satellite image (left) of the Safsaf Oasis in the eastern Sahara desert provides few clues as to the origin of the oasis. But a radar image (right), taken by the space shuttle Columbia in 1981, reveals the rock layer beneath the desert sand, unveiling an ancient topography with wide black channels cut by the meandering of an ancient river that once fed the oasis.
The ancient drainage system was fed by precipitation, primarily in the adjacent highlands in Libya, and developed on top of a very porous and permeable type of rock known as the Nubian sandstone. [COLOR=rgb(41, 105, 176)]This sandstone, which occurs beneath most of the Sahara Desert, is about 900 meters (3000 feet) thick and stores enormous quantities of groundwater, estimated to be in excess of 18,000 cubic kilometers (4300 cubic miles). The antiquity of this water has been confirmed by radiocarbon dating (see Chapter 8). These analyses show that the groundwater is about 35,000 years old, indicating that the water actually fell as precipitation during the last ice age.
Huu ni ujinga chuoni since everybody knows that the Sahara is already scorching hot and the white sands reflect a great deal of solar heat into the air.