China May Have Tamed Its Arid 'Sea of Death'

One of the world's driest places—the massive Taklamakan Desert in China—is ever so slowly becoming less of a desert. New research finds that decades of tree- and shrub-planting along the edges of the 130,000 square-mile desert is turning the area into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon than it emits into the atmosphere, reports Gizmodo. The effort—part of a 72-year state plan running through 2050—was first aimed at halting the spread of the desert amid China's urban expansion decades ago, but it's now also framed as a contribution to UN forest targets.

"We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification," study co-author Yuk Yung of Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells Live Science. The research team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists used NASA satellite data to track vegetation growth and CO2 levels around the desert, known by locals as the "Sea of Death." During the summer wet season, the greener zones reduced atmospheric CO2 by about 3 parts per million compared with the dry season, the team reports. The new forests and shrublands are modest compared with tropical rainforests, says King-Fai Li at the University of California, Riverside, but they have cut sandstorms and could serve as a template for carefully planned "green walls" in other harsh deserts. "Even deserts are not hopeless," he says.