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So anyway, speaking of China’s environmental problems, did anyone else catch that thing on NPR today about Chinese dust storms melting snow in the Rockies and causing all sorts of global problems?
This is the cycle, as described by the fellow on the radio report:
- Dust blows into the air, settles on snowy mountain tops.
- Snow gets darker, which means it absorbs more sunlight, which means it melts faster.
- Fast-melting snow does one of two things: fills reservoirs too quickly at once, causing floods (and messing up power generation equipment); doesn’t keep dripping throughout the year, causing rivers to run dry and crops to go thirsty (and messing up power generation equipment).
- Oh, plus the slushy, grimy snow is no good for skiing, either, so no tourist dollars there.
The effect is pretty dramatic:
Painter says he became captivated by dust after a ski trip with his dad, back when he was in graduate school. One morning, he scraped dust off a square of snow to expose a brilliant white surface underneath. When they came back at the end of the day, that white patch was no longer a dip, but actually the top of a column standing up from the surface.
“It didn’t melt away as quickly. And everything else was melting away dramatically that day,” Painter said. “So my father started drilling me with questions. ‘Where did the dust come from? How often does the dust come? Why does it accumulate at the surface?’ And I realized I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions.”
Conspicuously absent from the NPR report was the word “desertification,” which is the reason why there’s so darn much dust blowing off China to begin with. The picture up there is a NASA Earth Observatory image of dust blowing off China.
The stuff also comes from Colorado’s high plateau and the Great American Desert, but China’s rate of desertification has been raising eyebrows for quite some time. (I mean, if you think a few melting mountaintops are dramatic, check out this sandy situation.)
Desertification is, as you might guess, the process of making a desert. Of desertifying land. Once the land was green and lush, and now it is dry and dusty. This is a major environmental problem, especially in Asia, where water is a little more precious than it is here.
Today, officials announced they’d slowed the rate of desertification in China. This is one of those good news/bad news things. The good news is that China’s no longer losing over 4,000 square miles to the growing deserts every year. The bad news is that it’s still losing 1,160 square miles (and $1.6 billion) every year.
