Saving Canada's only desert • Hacker News Board

Re: Saving Canada's only desert

#71

Post by Aloha » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #67

That area is just the northern tip of a larger "desert" area in Washington State. There's plenty of "desert" in that area. It's just mostly on the other side of the border. It looks more like Silicon Valley in dry season than a real desert.

just because it doesn't have acres of sand, doesn't mean its not desert - large portions of California are just that - Semi Arid Plains

Re: Saving Canada's only desert

#72

Post by gwent » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

byron_fast wrote: post #55

Not sure why the Carberry desert doesn't qualify as a desert: https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g1871864-d50114... I was under the impression it holds the largest piece of "soft desert" in Canada, but maybe that's wrong.

"There are almost as many definitions of deserts and classification systems as there are deserts in the world. Most classifications rely on some combination of the number of days of rainfall, the total amount of annual rainfall, temperature, humidity, or other factors. In 1953, Peveril Meigs divided desert regions on Earth into three categories according to the amount of precipitation they received. In this now widely accepted system, extremely arid lands have at least 12 consecutive months without rainfall, arid lands have less than 250 millimeters of annual rainfall, and semiarid lands have a mean annual precipitation of between 250 and 500 millimeters. Arid and extremely arid land are deserts, and semiarid grasslands generally are referred to as steppes"

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/deserts/what/

As I understand it Carberry gets 300-500 mm of rain per year.

Re: Saving Canada's only desert

#73

Post by ommunist » Sun, Aug 14, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #68

ommunist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a wall of forest is being planned to stop the desertification of southern Africa". Very interesting, no kidding. Who is planning that? The last successful country in such endeavour is Kazakhstan. And to certain extent - China. Making 'wall of forest' is a programme with planning horizon of more than 50 years. I'd like to know the name of stakeholders.

So apparently Africa has a union not unlike the early EU [1] and they are in charge of it, as prominently mentioned in the wikipedia article above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union

Thank you. Forest plantations in arid zones are tricky thing. I know that, because I studied that topic for about a year. Expensive too. I wish them 100 years of piece and prosperity to complete that, and will gladly assist, if invited.