The Taklamakan Desert, which means "place to get in and out" in Uyghur, is often referred to locally as the "Sea of Death".

The whole desert is more than 1,000 kilometers long from east to west, more than 400 kilometers wide from north to south, with a total area of 337,600 square kilometers, which is the largest desert in Xinhua and the second largest mobile desert in the world.

Among the world's deserts, the Taklamakan Desert is the most mysterious and seductive.

Here, the height of the mound in the shape of a sand pyramid is generally 100-200 meters, and the highest is about 300 meters.

The types of sand dunes are complex and diverse, ranging from complex sand hills and ridges that resemble dragons resting on the earth, to tower-shaped dunes, to various honeycomb-shaped, feather-shaped, and fish-scale dunes.

In ancient times, the Taklamakan region was a place full of rivers and abundant water and grass.

But now, the average annual rainfall in the desert is less than 50 mm, while the annual evaporation is more than 3,000 mm.

In such an environment, it is difficult for any living thing to survive, and with the mobile sand dunes everywhere, it is arguably the most difficult area for the Taklamakan Desert to manage and green.

In March, Taoyuan Desert Development Co., Ltd. signed a formal agreement with the government to contract 40,000 square kilometers, or 60 million acres of Taklamakan Desert land, accounting for nearly one-eighth of the total area of the entire desert.

Considering that the desertification control cycle is too long and the benefits are too slow, the contract period is 99 years, and the first 30 years are exempt from tax.

Taoyuan Group promises to invest at least 100 billion yuan in desert transformation, and complete more than 30% of the contracted land greening projects within ten years, and the total greening rate will exceed 70%.

Meantime. It has the right to mortgage and guarantee the use, income, circulation and contracting management rights of desert land. and the right of first refusal.

Ye Quan spent a huge amount of money to start this plan. The main purpose is, of course, to control desertification, and to bring more people into this ranks.

Another purpose is to create a "desert paradise" the size of a treasure island province, to develop a processing industry by planting sea buckthorn, and to develop animal husbandry by using vegetation such as sand fixing grass and sand dates, so as to make it a mirage-like tourist resort.

As soon as the agreement was signed, Taoyuan Group started the construction of desert highways and desert airports while recruiting troops.

Presently. There are already two desert highways that cross the Taklamakan Desert, which is currently the world's longest graded highway through the mobile desert, passing through the Lunnan Oilfield, Tahe Oilfield and Tazhong Oilfield, and is also one of the destinations for many tourists to visit.

At the same time, in view of the ultra-low operating cost of electric aircraft in the future, the Taoyuan desert base will vigorously develop air operations and air transportation.

In order to allow the desert base to have sufficient fresh water resources for development, Ye Quan simply used the space to transport the icebergs in the ocean to the desert.

At this point, Ye Quan was still inspired by the iceberg consignment.

As early as the 1890s, before the invention of freezing technology, ships were used to haul Xiaoice mountains from the San Rafael Sea in Chile for profit. However, it was not for fresh water, but for the supply of ice for refrigeration.

It is estimated. Only about 1% of all freshwater resources on Earth are stored in rivers, lakes, swamps and groundwater, which can be used directly by humans; As for the remaining 99%, it is stored in glaciers and ice caps, and 90% of the glaciers and ice caps are at the poles.

The water of the glacier comes from the ocean, and due to the polar cold, the water vapor evaporated from the seawater quickly freezes on the glacier.

When seawater evaporates, only pure water vapor evaporates, and the salt in seawater does not evaporate, so the polar region can be regarded as a natural super-large desalination base.

Every year, more than 10,000 icebergs drift out of the continental ice shed in Antarctica and finally melt into the sea water of the Southern Hemisphere.

There are already specialized international companies for iceberg haulage to conduct research and practical operations in this area.

Ye Quan used a laser to chop the transferred icebergs to dissolve them into fresh water, and then stored them in some storage tanks, and also in some low-lying places, forming dozens of small artificial lakes.

Using the speed of the light armor, Ye Quan only needs to spend one or two hours to run back and forth from the South Pole or the North Pole, which is enough to obtain the water consumption of the desert base for a year.

In order to cover up, Taoyuan Group announced through the media that more than 100,000 cubic kilometers of groundwater have been discovered within the desert base, which will greatly accelerate the group's greening development plan.

In fact, the Taklamakan Desert does contain abundant groundwater, but Yequan does not want to overexploit it.

Such a situation is not a special case in the world.

The arid Sahara Desert, for example, is rich in groundwater, equivalent to the total flow of the Nile into the sea for more than a decade.

In 2000, Western Australia, Australia's driest region, discovered a huge subterranean sea that stored as much water as 4,200 Sydney Harbours and could supply 4,000 years of water in Perth, the capital of Western Australia.

However, with the expansion of green areas and the increasing water consumption year by year, it is definitely not possible to carry out iceberg transfer in this way.

At the same time as the desert greening project was launched, Taoyuan Group once again waved a big hand, and quickly reached a consensus with the governments at all levels of the three provinces and regions, water conservancy departments and related enterprises, and decided to carry out comprehensive cooperation, and officially launched the "seawater westward diversion" project, with a total investment of tens of billions of yuan.

The idea of a "westward diversion of seawater" project was conceived as early as the last century, and the original idea was to suppress the desert by filling the desert with large quantities of seawater, saltwater lakes and closed tectonic basins to form man-made seawater rivers and saltwater lakes.

At the same time, a large amount of seawater relies on the abundant solar energy in Northwest China to evaporate naturally, as a water and gas supply source to humidify the northern climate, so as to increase rainfall, so as to achieve the purpose of controlling deserts and sandstorms, and completely changing the poor ecological environment in North China and Northwest China.

However, the project was rejected because it was feared that it would cause salinization of the land along the route and aggravate the salinization of land in the Western Regions Province.

Later, the proposed desalination plan was widely questioned and controversial because of its high cost, and was considered to be just a "fantasy science fiction idea" and "a beautiful idea".

But now Taoyuan Group has a low-energy, high-yield seawater desalination technology, and finally the price of each ton of fresh water imported into the Western Regions can be reduced to less than 5 yuan, providing a large number of low-cost freshwater resources for water-scarce areas along the way, which naturally clears a qiē obstacle.

The main water diversion route of the "Seawater Westward Diversion" project is about 1,900 kilometers long, passing through relatively flat desert areas or the Gobi Desert, covering the seven deserts of Xinhua, namely Hunshandak Desert, Mu Us Desert, Kubuqi Desert, Ulan Buhe Desert, Tengger Desert, Badain Jaran Desert and Taklamakan Desert.

If this project can be realized, it will be of no less important significance than the Three Gorges Project and the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which will solve the "poor ecology" and "development bottleneck" caused by water shortage along the route in one fell swoop, and serve the greening of the Northwest Desert, rebuilding the beautiful ecological environment of mountains and rivers, and curbing sandstorms.

If the desert is used efficiently to develop agriculture like Israel, at least another 1.8 billion mu of agricultural land can be added, laying a solid foundation for the vigorous development of the sand industry in the 21st century.

With water, the desert is no longer a forbidden area for humans!

At the beginning of the construction of the desert highway, Taoyuan Desert Development Company used the Tazhong Desert Airport for material transfer, which is the first desert airport in Xinhua, located in the hinterland of the desert, which can take off and land large and medium-sized passenger aircraft.

In addition, the dispatch quickly built three settlements and a small, modern airfield in the desert base.

When the personnel and equipment arrived, they began to use the aircraft to fly seeds in the desert.

In order to increase the success rate of sowing, before flying sowing, the seeds are dressed in a "coat", which consists of binders, inorganic and organic micro-fertilizers, plant cellulose, water retaining agents and other raw materials.

The fertilizer and plant hormones in the coat can not only supply nutrients to the seeds, but also improve the desert soil quality, and can also provide sufficient oxygen for the seeds, so that the seeds germinate early, which is conducive to the rooting and growth of plants; At the same time, the water retention agent provides enough water to the seeds to germinate normally.

In addition, this coat increases the weight of the seeds, avoids the displacement of the seeds, and allows the fly seeds to germinate and grow normally in the middle and upper parts of the dunes. A repellent is also added to keep the seeds "rigid" when dry, so that the seeds are not swallowed by birds and mice.

If the rain does not fall in time, the personnel at the base will also use a simple modified aircraft to carry water and carry out a sprinkling from the air to irrigate it.

The vitality of the sand fixing grass is extremely tenacious, whether it is left on the surface of the desert or buried deeply, it can sprout and take root, as long as it does not encounter extreme dry weather, it will rarely die. (To be continued......)