61–70 of 285 posts
Maybe take an page from the Easter Islander playbook: Build vast networks of rock wall closed cells. Wind blowing over these will tend to deposit some of its soil. Bonus points if the walls are high enough to keep out sheep. ;-)
> As a result, Iceland is a case study in desertification, with little or no vegetation, though the problem is not heat or drought. About 40 percent of the country is desert, Dr. Halldorsson said. “But there’s plenty of rainfall — we call it ‘wet desert.’” At first I thought it was an error to call an area that gets plenty of rain a desert. I thought desert was strictly defined by the amount of rainfall. But maybe th…
There is a very famous race series for runners called the 4 Deserts. One race, called the Last Desert, takes place in Antarctica. It may surprise you, like it did me - in fact blew my mind - to learn Antarctica is the largest desert in the World.
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>it's the single most naturally devastated landscape on the entire continent. Isn't half of it technically on another continent?
No, half of it is on the North American continental plate, but those don't determine what constitutes a continent. If they did half of Japan would be in North America.
Define an area, load the saplings and send the robot to bore holes, put the sapling, fill, repeat.
I wonder if massive temporary greenhouses over sections of the land would help get trees established. It'd protect areas from wind (erosion), sheep, and cold temperatures until the soil was remediated and the trees were high enough to avoid hungry sheep. They already grow saplings in greenhouses.
Since they grow saplings in greenhouses and take those out into the world, greenhouse space is likely economically constrained. It seems optimal to start a bunch of trees, and send them on their way, and keep the process going.
They currently have a ban on imports of live trees, and lack restrictions on sheep grazing (learned per other comments on this post). These things alone might be less costly than constructing lots of temporary structures.
For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland. Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in. Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's nativ…
Maybe there should be some sort of global chaga tax to fund birch reforestation. If a few bucks was added to every Amazon order or whatever then that would at least help out a bit.
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Wolves can help in this case too.
Yeah - there has been a fair amount of debate about reintroducing wolves and lynx to Scotland. Sea eagles have been reintroduced but they aren't quite large enough to eat deer... ;-)
If they are hungry enough they will!
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Indeed the little ice age of the middle ages is what made Greenland uninhabitable. Birch is a pioneer species, they produce millions of seeds a year, they chased the retreating ice cap as melted northwards in Europe. It would appear they need to be planted out, perhaps they need soil to take. Otherwhise it should be a fairly simple case of just broadcasting billions of birch seeds over Iceland.
Greenland didn't become uninhabitable during the little ice age, there's people living now in Greenland descended from people who survived that supposedly uninhabitable country. The Norse colony got wiped out, but it's unknown whether that was because of war, famine or some other reason. We just know life would have been hardier in those years. What little we do know suggests that they were unwilling to learn the tra…