By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa
(This article is in submission for the X Prize)
The purpose of this article is for Transformations to form a consortium of global corporations including Halliburton, Bechtel, Desertec consortium, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Reliance Industries and others to engage in geo-engineering to de-desertify Sahara, Thar and Gobi desert areas in North Africa, India and Mongolia from now to 2032, at the moment in lieu of ideas such as Planetary Resources of Peter Diamandis backed by a few billionaires such as Sir Richard Branson to mine asteroids.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has significant experience in clearing desert areas to build cities together with US Corporations and in creating the city of Masdar in United Arab Emirates.
Desertec, a European consortium is actively pursuing solar energy production around the Sahara for European use. This proposal absorbs Desertec into a larger consortium of Eurasian and American corporations for de-desertification of vast, unused land areas on earth to prepare for 2050 when the global population will reach about 10 billion people.
Policy, management and engineering details of this proposal will be shared with the consortium upon the contractual formation of the group.
Some Speculation About A Theory Of The Origins Of The Sahara
Occupying nearly all of North Africa, about 3,600,000 square miles, between the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea east, Mediterranean in the north to the jungle of the Congo in the south lays the Sahara, a barren landmass as large as China or the United States capable of comfortably and at least self-sufficiently accommodating about 1 billion people.
This article posits that the deserts surrounding the Mediterranean and across the Arabian Sea are vast sandy beaches remaining behind as water drained into the Atlantic ocean, Mediterranean and Arabian seas after the end of the last ice age because of plate tectonic activity in the Mediterranean (African plate which runs up to the Swiss Alps) and in the Atlantic by the Atlantic Ridge (the North American plate) where Plato’s Atlantis (modern day Azores) is said to have once existed.
The Congo jungle in the south may have been the land on the border of the sandy beach of a sea after the last ice age, bordered by the Mediterranean southern Europe in the north.
The caving-in of ocean and sea floors due to geological activity in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Arabian seas may have caused the rapid drainage of water from the melted ice and the higher seal levels after the last ice age about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, resulting in the formation of persistently large desert areas because of climate change, closing the Sahara Gateway for migration to Eurasia from Africa.
Geo-engineering The Sahara
When return to the hostile and instantly fatal environments of moon and Mars and mining asteroids can be beguiling for vast sums of money, the Sahara seems like a walk in the park in the cradle of earth, surrounded by water on three sides and the vegetation of a tropical forest on the fourth.
It is indeed not difficult to restore the Sahara as a quasi-continental plain/grassland – larger than any of the Eurasian steppe, the African Savannah, South American Pampas, and the North American Prairie – bearing the potential to feed nearly all of humanity.
