I wonder about this more generally a lot, and have idly looked for a silviculture textbook that could explain it in more detail. If you want to undo desertification then everyone says you want to have trees, but the trees have to be the kind of trees that "are supposed to be there." I could imagine that a short term investment of groundwater pumping might be useful to get a forest started *if* you knew that somehow the forest would, eventually, "attract" enough rain to keep going without the groundwater. But is that really a thing? And if it is how do you figure out if it would work in any given place with any particular set of trees? Silviculture textbooks are hard to find in person for browsing purposes and expensive to buy online so one day I will have to actually go to the library probably. Unless the mineshaft knows the answer.
Thos reminds me of The Four Pests Campaign under Mao, with similar disastrous ecological results.
Supposedly it worked on Ascension, but that's a tropical island, the air is moist. The prevailing wind in North China blows out of Central Asia. And even on Ascension the downwind side isn't forested.
The thing about geoengineering is that its so easy to fuck up. Remember that when companies start trying to spray aerosols into the air to prevent global warming.
I think it's time we all think about the Nebraska National Forest, which is pretty much the same thing done for the same reason.
Some of us don't come from Nebraska.
Teo, if you're going to list all of us who don't come from Nebraska, you'll have to do more than one at a time if you don't want it to take forever.
On satellite most of Ascension looks looks like desert actually. The green looks to be mostly grass.
Sounds like the kind of project someone will write about in a future book like Dust Bowl or Empire of Dust.
Also, on 5 minutes' research the Great Plains Shelterbelt things weren't really like the OP, they were mostly windbreaks, intended to protect enough soil to sustain grasses (counting crops as grasses), not to stop dune movement, much less to turn desert into forest.
13, was that all the osage orange trees?
13: Those are different from the National Forest.
15: Seriously, what is 6 supposed to mean?
14: Apparently. (That article taught me my new favorite word, Comanchería.)
They planned an entire forest near Halsey, Nebraska, which I had always thought was a CCC project, but the internet says it predates the Dust Bowl.
Had Halsey, Nebraska been variously sand dunes or short-grass steppe since the Zhou Dynasty?
It's been sand dunes covered by grass since well before that. I don't know how long the grass would be if cows weren't eating it.
I know lots of people haven't been to Halsey, but it's pretty much the same as Ord.
Apologies to central Nebraska lurkers for the over generalization.
The Sand Hills? It's a weird environment on satellite. To what extent are those little lakes between the dunes artificial? Fed with groundwater or rain?
I don't know enough, but on the face of it the Great Plains and north China are basically different, seeing the Plains run N-S and are traversed by (exotic?) rivers from the Rockies.
North China is a useless descriptor. Inner Mongolia plus the Ordos, I guess.
How little are the lakes you're asking about?
Anyway, the lakes are mostly artificial. The small ones from ground water and the big ones from dams.
I meant the groundwater lakes apparently. Who's the geologist, Stormcrow?
For the viability of the forests I remain skeptical seeing as right next to one of them you can see features like this, which I interpret as a windpump-fed drinking trough with ground trod bare by cattle radiating outward.
Also, legit disappointed Ord wasn't named after the Ordos.
Who's the geologist, Stormcrow?
He did once educate me about endorheic basins, which has resulted mostly in me remembering the word "endorheic."
He taught me that I live on a plateau. It doesn't look like it because it's a shitty plateau.
What's the dispute here? I thought Moby was just saying that the Nebraska National Forest resulted from a similar artificial tree-planting effort in a semiarid plains environment, which I hadn't known before but from what sparse information I can find seems to be at least partially correct. (The National Forest was cobbled together from several different forests in the area, at least one of which was artificial.)
I think the cobbling is pretty recent. It used to just be that the National Forest was the artificial part.
The thing about geoengineering is that it's so easy to fuck up.
AMEN. This has gone rocketing up the list of my global warming-related fears over the past year or two, particularly since I read the NYT magazine rundown of the palm oil-biodiesel fiasco. (I'm sharing the link but I realize I have no appetite for discussion of it. Or of anything. I guess I might have an appetite for constructive high-level discussion of how it might, in theory, be possible to avoid making things worse rather than better through engineering, taking into account people as they are now and not as we wish they were now... idfk.)
Nebraska National Forest was established on November 15, 1907 by the consolidation of three smaller forests: Dismal River, Niobrara and North Platte National Forests.
But I haven't been able to figure out exactly where each of those previous forests was and how they relate to the current division into ranger districts. It's possible all three were artificial.
It also currently appears to be managed together with a few other USFS units (National Forests and Grasslands) in the same general area, which is pretty common these days.
Bessey is the artificial one. That's Dismal River. I don't know if the others are artificial or not, but they don't have nearly so many trees.
I had no idea they existed until today.
Pine Ridge is very nice, if you like scenery and stuff, but it isn't artificial.
The name is a bit of a clue, I suppose.
No dispute really. My question is how similar the two plains actually are (hence CrowSignal), how similar the projects are, and how scalable the Nebraska plantings are.
Moby introduced his data as koan, which confused me.
The plains are generally considered pretty similar, I think, although obviously there are some major differences such as the north-south versus east-west orientation that you already pointed out. There are some interesting parallels between the Central Asian nomadic societies and the post-Contact Plains tribes such as the Comanche, for example. I don't know about the projects.
I do have real issues with clarity.
I'm not going to do anything about it except mention it so people can adapt if they are interested.
Anyway I think my half-assed comparison was reasonable considering, per Teo's link in 38, "At one point it was the largest man-made forest in the world, but has been surpassed by a forest in China." It might even be the same forest as in the OP, but there's no way to tell without looking it up.
I'm just happy to learn that Nebraska has trees.
Anyway, in spite of the area having a very strong anti-communist vibe, Nebraskans had about the same reaction to their treeless expanses as the Chinese did. "Hey, this place needs some fucking trees," they both said.
However, Nebraska has really bad Chinese food.
No. Still waiting on the geologists.
46: "There are some interesting parallels between the Central Asian nomadic societies and the post-Contact Plains tribes such as the Comanche..."
Horses would constitute a big difference, I imagine. Perhaps I should have posted this as Opinionated Chinggis Khan?
this looks like it could be interesting (1942 paper on the Nebraska project) but I cannot find a copy.
Don't need koans. Take my Enlightenment with a capital E.
60: I can't get it either. Stupid not university-internet.
Horses would constitute a big difference, I imagine.
Post-contact, so horses are a similarity. Pre-contact, yes, that's a big difference.
63: Reading recs on the general idea welcome. Did the Plains tribes have livestock?
Yeah, no livestock except horses until the reservation period. They were really able to capitalize on the buffalo as a subsistence base, though. I can't think of any reading recommendations offhand but I'll think about it.
I assume it's a pain in the ass to be nomadic and keep cattle. I can't think of examples, the way you do with sheep or horses or whatever.
It came out after I dropped out of reading a lot of US west history, but Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire got good reviews, IIRC.
Goats are a good animal to be nomadic with.
Cats that to ride horses or camels would also work.
Chickens with unusually high endurance.
How much are you supposed to drink before all day meetings with out of town bosses? Asking for a friend.
Dogs that don't mind pulling a wagon.
68: Yeah, I haven't read it either but I have heard good things about it. That's probably as good a place as any for Mossy to start.
74: Wheels are older than walls, apparently.
I assume it's a pain in the ass to be nomadic and keep cattle.
But transhumant dairy herds were common all over Europe and Great Britain for millennia. And you might have had horses, but you could definitely have had oxen. (looking a bit of stuff up) Lots of transhumance, nomadic and otherwise, in cattle-raising cultures across Africa, but I haven't worked out if they all got camels and/or horses at the same time. Again oxen are going to be hardier and, you know, right there.
The Comanche Empire is excellent.
Thanks everyone.
77: IIRC The acquisition of horses by herders in the West African Sahel had masive political effects.
"Empire of the Summer Moon" is pretty good for a non-academic overview of the Comanche.
As far as I'm concerned, oxen are cows. But I think transhumance of the switching between summer and winter pastures is different from true nomadic herding where you aren't in the same place at the same time each year.
81: Is that a standard definition? All the nomads I can think of are at, if not the same place at the same time each year, at one of a limited number of places.
Fine, but it has to be more than switching back and forth between two places.
No Swiss people need apply, is what you're saying.
I thought the logic of truly nomadic herding was that you were on such unproductive ground that you needed to keep moving around to give the grazing time to regrow (or have one animal per square mile or something, which is clearly impractical). And if you're on poor ground, you probably don't want to have cattle, you want something tougher like sheep or goats.
When you have pastoralist cattle-herders causing trouble in places like the Sahel, it's not nomads moving through farmed land, it's pastoralists moving into farmed land and settling down.
That reminds me of the sign in the hospital reading "Pastoral Care." If I ever had a sheep, I was going to bring in for a check-up.
They changed the sign, which makes me hope somebody else tried it.
The doctors there are outstanding in their fields.
One can sort the true Christians from the poseurs by bringing in a brown goat.
86: IDK. Looks as if it's a spectrum more than a hard distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumance#Etymology_and_definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadic_pastoralism#David_Christian's_account
89 Only works with popes, and possibly not even with them
There's a whole center for studying you right down the street from me. Complete with library and Pokestop.
Ah, this was the thread that Moby mentioned in the other thread.
Don't know too much in detail about the Sand Hills. A place I intend to visit now that I theoretically have lots of time. Wife and I might not agree on amount of time it is worth spending there...
There are some artificial lakes but most of them are natural, both seasonal and permanent. Decent amounts of rainfall (compared to actual "deserts" and a the presence of the relatively shallow Ogalalla aquifer in conjunction with the aeolian nature of the landscape create the many wetlands (lots of fens).
There are a number of areas on the High Plains where there are "secondary" aeolian deposits from the Rockies (blown there from the fluvial deposits closer to the mountains), but am not sure what unique characteristics led to them resulting in dunes in Nebraska. Apparently when the climate gets just a tad drier than now, the dunes "reactivate" (they are stabilized by vegetation for the most part at the present) and get blown around. This apparently has happened as recently as 1000 AD.
There seems to be a very thorough book on the region, The Nebraska Sand Hills: The Human Landscape by Charles Barron McIntosh who was geographer at University of Nebraska.
The preceding comment will definitely go into my blog "Sad Puppies" which will entirely consist of earnest comments left long after a thread has died.
Also this one.
Sometimes people tried to farm them, resulting in going Brooke and great big patches of sand.
Brooke should be broke. Stupid phone.
It turns out that growing on a thin layer of soil resting on save dunes is a shitty business plan.
Good thing you negotiated a flat fee for every comment.
93.last: book is $855 on Amazon. No microfilm reprint apparently.
106: You can see snippets via search on Google books.
It's probably in the library at UNL, since people are always going to Lincoln.
At about 20 minutes in to this video there is a piece on the Bessey Nursery which provides trees to a lot of western National Forests.
I had never heard of it before this thread.
I visited as a kid. I can't remember if we toured the nursery or just drove by on the way to camp. This was close to forty years ago.
And speaking of endorheic basins, a sort of obvious thing once you think about it a bit is that they generally occur in very dry regions because otherwise the water continues to accumulate (as opposed to evaporating or seeping into the ground) until it over tops the higher land surrounding the basin and drains through an outlet (while further eroding it, lowering the level of the water).
On a small scale, areas with very porous and permeable soils can lead to (typically small) endoheric lakes as the water percolates through the ground fast enough to balance the inflow. Sand hill areas are one example, as well as is karst topography (limestone areas where underground channels erode quite easily. IN both instances the lakes are well-connected to nearby surface-flowing rivers but through underground aquifers rather than surface streams.
Get your sad pedantic puppies right here, motherfuckers (see 94).
I love geography, Stormcrow. We can be sad together.
111 sort of supposes that in general erosion is more powerful than tectonics, no? Interesting.
If it were always, the Earth would be a sphere covered in an even layer of water.
And all of our problems just aren't going to be solved that easily.
109: How many tonnes of carbon were burned producing that thing? Christ.
A nice satellite photo of the Sand Hills.
113: I don't think it does imply that, but I'm noodling a bit on why it doesn't.
In general, uplift and erosional processes are somewhat in balance. Clearly in spots one or the other will dominate.
Let's look at a theoretical circular, undrained basin. First, the accumulation of water in an area with significant rainfall *is* much faster than any uplift (or erosion). So at some point the water overtops the encircling highlands even if there is ongoing uplift. However, uplift is never uniform so it will over top at a low point. And in more realistic scenarios, the uplift rarely occurs all the way around (see Crater Lake below, however*) on a large scale, there is generally some side that is not undergoing uplift. But even in our hypothetical, the outlet will be concentrated at a low spot, and at that point the erosion will almost certainly be more powerful than the uplift at that spot. Unlike some high point on the rim of the basin that continues to grow in height, but that is *not* where the water will find to exit. In general the water just needs to find one place and will end up concentrating all of its erosive power in that spot. As kind of an example , when the Gros Ventre slide (still visible in Grand Teton Park) occurred in 1925 it created a dam and then two years later the water overtopped and quickly eroded a deep channel resulting in a flash flood which killed a number of people.
Or consider the Colorado Plateau. Generally speaking, tectonic uplift has dominated erosion there over a significant geologic time period and as a result it is a high plateau over a mile in elevation (and in a location like the volcanic San Francisco Mountains NW of Flagstaff, tectonics has been even more dominant, raising 10,000 ft + mountains). However, where concentrated water did gain purchase, the erosion has defeated the uplift, hence the canyon.
*On a small scale, it can happen. for instance, Crater Lake is an example where an endoheric lake persists in a rainy location--it is a very small and the rainfall collection area has not overtopped the walls (evaporation and seep balance out).
Well sure, but the water is evaporating as well as precipitating.
And on uplift, how about the Southern African plateau? Bigger than Colorado, often higher, mostly arid to semi-arid, not especially characterized by endorheic basins. There are some in the Kalahari, Great Karoo, Northern Namibia; but the plateau is vast, most of the continent south of the Congo. But I guess that proves your point, what with the waterfalls at Victoria, Augrabies, Epupa, Inga.
Actually Southern Africa proves your point pretty perfectly. Endorheism correlates very neatly with rainfall. The Congo Basin the perfect exemplar, the plateau uplift plus Rift Valley mountains to the east, but ITCZ water cutting right through.
What if somebody didn't bless the rains down in Africa?
119: So maybe in a few decades, Nebraska has the largest human-planted forest in the world again.