Can you make a video discussing the effects of population decline in certain countries and regions. It's rarely talked about yet has huge implications for the priorities and challenges facing states
Because it's been tested like 100 times and every single time it's been tested by anyone with a brain it's completely and utterly unfeasible. Also basic physics shows that it would never work either.
@@pupdaddie Could you elaborate more on the relation of 1st Law of Thermodynamic and engineering project that wants to reroute some water to inland Australia?
As an Aussie, we can't manage water flow already in the outback. Farmers growing cotton in the desert (a water hungry crop) draw too much water from the Murray already, to the point it stops flowing properly and massive fish die offs occur frequently. A plan to Irrigate the interior would be abused before the water ever reached there, much like what we currently have.
@@jamesgoldring1052 Because they are allowed to sadly. These parasite grow cash crops and take huge amounts of water out of the murry-darling, which they use to fund the australian national and liberal parties, to write legislation that legitimizes their water theft. I recommend watching FriendlyJordies video on it called "Blood Water: the war for Australia's water". He explains it a lot better than i ever could.
We can't manage it because the scheme was ran by corrupt members of the Nat party. Yeah the greens were flops the way they carried on, but they had a point on how bad it was.
The whole East coast of Australia is flooded right now. The water will come from the monsoon tropical north, which has a wet season every year producing huge amounts of water, most of which runs into the oceans.
The real problem in Australia is the salt which rises from the water table beneath the ground when you remove deep rooted trees/water it too much. There are 1000 good ideas to water Australia, but you’ll get nowhere until you you fix the salt problem! I like to think about this from time to time and hope I can get funding for a few ideas when I finish study.
@Handsome Monkey King - Trees are the solution to both the salt problem and the drought problem of the interior (and a few others too). We need to plant billions in Oz! Have you ever read about the rainfall study done in the 1980s along the rabbit proof fence? One finding was that there was more rainfall on the eastern side of the fence where mulga was growing compared to the western side which was cleared and farmed. The upshot being that even stunted and sparse tree cover increases rainfall.
As a hydrologist, I always advise caution about terraforming. The amount of fresh water needed for such feats are gargantuan, beyond what can be visualized by common sense. I’m convinced that, no matter how much it seems to rain on the coast, it’s still far short of what’s needed to “green a desert” If successful, the most likely outcome is irrigated agriculture, increasing food security and plus an economic boost for Australia. Job creation will be minimal, given you will want to maximize yields through mecanization. The cost however is less water available for the costal cities (increasing reliance on desalination), plus an almost certain collapse of coastal ecosystem (due to decrease of freshwater inflow), taking a toll on fisheries and tourism.
The people will be moved, and the land once used for agriculture (before wide-spread urbanisation), will be used for agriculture again, albeit to a limited capacity.
it's been calculated many times and would work, job creation is irrelevant as we have 4% national unemployment rate which gets closer to 0% as you move inland, it's not like many Australian want to work on a farm. Anyway with greenies and environmentalists are in charge there is no way something like this would eventuate, and if they find one Aboriginal scratch whole project cancelled
@@ok-re1md yeeeeah, that 4% claim made by our current government is more than a little inaccurate and very easy to see the fudging once you dig about a garden trowel deeper than media put out by Fairfax/Murdoch/ABC...
Dear Australia. If you guys figure out how to get sufficient water in the interior without wrecking the environment, lets us know in US how it is done so we can do the same for the southwest. If we figure it out first, I promise we will share the info!
As an Australian, I lived in Longreach, western Queensland for some time and it didn't matter what you tried to grow, the soil was so poor and low in nutrients you had to build up the soil in your garden through compost and mulch to get anything to grow and thrive. I think a lot of the area mentioned is very poor for growing things...adding lots of fertiliser is not the answer.
Agree with you, Mike. Though I'm from the other side of Australia, W.A. Where north of Geraldton the land gets sparser and sparser until you reach the Pilbara which consists of rock, rock and more rock. In between the hills you get streams and rivers which dry out during Dry season. Along river banks there is good soil washed down during wet season, things grow there easily, but go further out like 1/2 kilometre and the soil disapears and the rock claims the ground again. Over centuries the top soil has been washed away and exposed the stone/rock/minerals underneath, nothing can be grown on the surface in large quantities. On my last visit up there, I did visit an Aboriginal settlement that was farming lucern, oats and hay stock feeds via a rotary inundation watering system, the water was derived from the iron ore open cut mining facilities which needed to dewater the depths to get at the rich iron ore, so the water supply was plentiful. But all this is only small scale.
I thought the EXACT same thing! But then I thought about how smart it was for him to make that comparison. Everyone watching this channel likely has a good idea of the size of Ukraine by now, since we are all mostly geopolitical nerds. It’s an area fresh in our minds. Smart comparison, CR. But yeah, I definitely thought the same thing as you lol
I think the comparison was due to Ukraine being known as the breadbasket of Europe, not just recent events. I think it was well placed , if Ukraine can supply Europe then Australia could theoretically feed Asia ....
unless ya wanna build up, it will keep happening. Or somehow force people just to live in arid towns, ignoring why people don't go there (climate and jobs)
You should look into "Keyline Design" developed by the Australian farmer P.A. Yeoman. The idea is to slow down the water flow from precipitation down a terrain, locally, by making it follow the contour lines. One way to do this cost- and space-efficiently is to have farm roads be placed on the lower side of the contour, effectively making the road's upper ditch act as the "dam"/river of incomming watee. The water then travels parallel to the contour, gradually departing from it to the next, lower contour. This can all be adapted to the specific context of the system in question, but has huge potential to locally maximize water-capture following the rare rain-periods.
Completely agree mate, keyline design using swales is a game changer for farming. Only problem is in regard to broad acre agriculture, not that it's unfeasible, but that it's different and requires a completely different mindset and operations model.
The Chin dynasty in China had a similar problem in the form of the Min River which constantly delivered droughts and floods instead of massive amounts of food that it had the potential of bringing. The Chin built levies and irrigated a massive swathe of Eastern China which made it into what it is today, second only to South Asia in terms of population density in a massive agricultural region like Eastern China. It's strange to hear these days what with the dry, poor soil, but one day in the far future Eastern Australia will be as populous as Eastern China, at which time they will be one of the great poles along with the Eastern US, Eastern China, South Asia, Europe, Southern Brazil, East Africa and West Africa. They will all one day be as populous as one another as the knowledge of Aztec water gardens is translated and spread, they could easily grow corn that has very nearly as many calories per acre as rice or potatoes but it will get 8 harvests a year instead of one. One day, half of Australia will look like Mediterranean Europe.
Nope. Anyone interested in land rehabilitation and water management should look at Peter Andrews work. His book “Back from the brink” is the most important introductory resource on land and water management in the Australian context. He actually covers why keyline isn’t the best option in the book as his techniques are in some ways similar but very different. First you must understand how the system developed to understand how all humans who have called this land home, have contributed to destroying it.
As an Australian all I can say is don't expect much. We are a country full of stupidity, we've been employing the same Agricultural techniques for decades possibly centuries and as a result we have turned huge swathes of once productive land into saline shit holes and deserts, overgrazing, mono-cultures you name it, we do it. Plenty of great farmers exist and have learnt to adapt to the variable and harsh climates and their success shouldn't be ignored, but plenty more are stuck doing the same thing their grandfather did. Every drought is worse then the last and water-management by the government becomes more and more corrupt. If you want to see successful long term agricultural policy, I wouldn't look to my country.
Oh yeah, goodbye Bathurst Platypus, and a local indigenous water rat: "water management". They're kaputski af. "Every drought is worse *THAN" not then. You'll notice how the spellchecker doesn't pick the mistake up ... because "then" is not incorrectly spelt, but it _is_ the wrong word.
I'm Australian and I reject Scott Moronson's plan to green the Outback. The Outback is dry and arid because Father Nature has decreed for the Outback to be dry and arid and we have no right to interfere in that decree, just as the Soviets had no right to dry up the beautiful Aral Sea. Father Nature always knows best.
The Australian Government can't even manage to implement an internet infrastructure plan that was out dated before they even began and went insanely over budget and is still crap so I can only imagine what a mess they would make of a project as ambitious as this.
I myself am a geopolitical youtuber and Australian government has messed up on infrastructure projects before but this time it looks different and the recent commitment by the Australian government to Fastrack infrastructure projects seems practical.
@@AdityaRathoreproductionyou could possibly be correct i guess we will just have to wait and see how scotty plans it out and just hope he does not waste a few billion dollars while he's at it
That is why I only move to houses in Australia with FTTP. Don't wait for it to come to you, go to it. On 1giga FTTP now. Not as good as the fastest speeds in Europe, but still great. Upload speeds are still trash, but that's the norm in non-European countries.
Here's a thought. If the cities in S/E Queensland treat an average of 1GL of sewage per day! only to dump it in the ocean, why not invest in a pipeline powered by renewable energy to push the treated water over the great dividing range and let it flow down river from there. 1,000,000,000L a day is a ton of fresh water to wave farewell to the ocean. It could recharge the rivers and give water to agriculture.
@@brianyang5075 indeed, we basically hire them to do their jobs and it's time that we do make sure they are serving the people... Without going into conspiracy theories ofc xD
The Australian Government minister (Barnaby Joyce) that announced this project has a history of bungling up the water allocations for our major river systems. As a consequence, a review panel was set up to analyse all future government funded water projects. However, this recently announced reworking of the inland diversion has had no feasibility or environmental impact studies. When the members of the review panel started contacting each other about this announcement (and their lack of opportunity to comment), Joyce's office staff sacked them all via email. In other news, we're about to have an election down here. Hence the timing of the announcement.
The real plum would be creating deep navigable rivers next to good farmland. The USA did this with the Mississippi River watershed. You build industrial cities on this network near the raw resources (like Pittsburgh), and you have cheap industry with easy access to the world market. Only don't make your main port like New Orleans. It's a perfect place for a port but a lousy place for a city. It's under the level of the river. Derp. You may even want to build out into the ocean and get that super port much closer to the action.
I’m Australian. I’m not sure where you are getting this but this is absolutely in no way happening at all. Water management is a big deal here, and it is certainly subject to heated discussions, but wide scale irrigation of massive outback areas is just not discussed.
I have lived in Cairns in Northern Queensland twice over the years and all ill say is during the wet season (Summer) the rain is unworldly! it's unreal how much it rains and all that water is mostly wasted. Massive storm drain pipes would help mitigate evaporation, it would be ridiculously expensive but worth it in the long run to terraform the Outback maybe/probably? I would support a Royal Commision into the topic and accept there findings and if they give it the green light then why not do it.
@@HavNCDy For a project of this size you would probably need lawyers to look into it on all sorts of level's but I agree and I get your point. We need to look at the prespective of Aboriginal Australians, Engineers, Farmers, Lawyers the lot. What I was trying to say is that it's worth the 2-3 million dollers of tax payers money to look into it.
@@davidgrowsdragonfruit5301 We get alot of water during the wet season mate and most of it is wasted. We need to be more efficient with our water managment in the future.
All the local jobs as well would be great for local economies. As Australians we are quite good at digging big holes...😂 We mine Iron Ore on massive scales. We could do it!
Salt coming up from the soil is a problem throughout the USA southwest and a solution to it doesn't appear likely. This project could result in a Continential disaster.
The clue is in one of the first sentences Shirvan said. "Since the 1930s..." If there's been plans around for almost a century, it's science fiction and nothing else. CaspianReport has been better a few years back. It's become a clickbaity and sensationalized channel after it blew up..
@@schtreg9140 I some parts of western Kansas and central Texas and western Oklahoma ideas like this have worked well but these areas are semi-arid. In areas like New Mexico and Arizona the salt is slowly killing the vegetation despite the irrigation. The project appears too ambitious according to the Caspian Report and the locals in Australia. To green that much of the continent sounds like too ambitious to me. On the other hand, I am sure that Australia could do better than it is doing currently.
The US has been pumping water from wells that have a high saline content. Were talking about rainfall sent into the interior which should have an opposite effect.
No. Science can reduce History (and all who sail in her) to an embarrassing montage of madness. Of course we are better than that. See Carl Sagan's _Pale Blue Dot_ speech. Now that is eloquence.
@@WindofChange2023 Well, first there's the - what is the genome offering?, argument. Wall to wall alphas last I looked. 'C-' is our highest mark so far. Then there's the _distributed systems_ with an _invisible hand_ component in conjunction with 'individual autonomy' that historically produces the best results position. The Democracy plus Capitalism, and waiting for Science argument. Then *Regenerative Agriculture's* 'restoring Eden' argument. Then there's the demand that Atheism comes up with a completed 'meaning for life' proposal which is just a rehash of the above. Belief is thus reduced to Art in its many formats. Of course it's fixable but will this Cosmic experiment ever be ready? Till then your argument above is senseless. Was he a great Scientist? No. He was great communicator. Politics and the unequal distribution of power is the recurrent theme of history, it's ego, failure, messy and stupid mostly. Where on earth did pacifism enter the argument? If you mean Vietnam - what happened there? Afghanistan, the prequel?
You have to be cautious of people with big ideas. When a large public works becomes more important than the people it serves, it will usually do more harm than good. When history haters use the word "history", they often use it as a code phrase for "government force".
This reminds me of the Salton Sea disaster and part of Eastern Arizona that was irrigated about 100 years ago until the irrigated land became too salty for farming. There are ways to irrigated deserts without making the land too salty, but it requires careful management with allowing some of the water to bring the salt with it as it makes it to the seas.
One of the main problems is that these rivers will never make it to the sea. They discharge into inland basins and slowly drain into the groundwater, guaranteeing a rise in salinity. When you see a lake on any map of Australia, chances are that it is rarely underwater.
Most of the time, most of the "lakes" in the outback of South Australia look like recent photos of the Salton Sea. As SocialDownclinber implied, they do occasionally get wet if there is a big influx of flood water but usually they are vast salt flats.
@@SocialDownclimber Incidentally, one of the "big greening ideas" that got bandied about when I was a kid (mid last century) was use nukes to blast a channel from Port Augusta northward to that potential inland sea because a fair area there is below sea level. Of course that water would have become VERY salty when inflow from the Spencer Gulf brought in more salt as evaporation from the inland sea outpaced fresh water from rains in its catchment... ie: constantly. Perhaps new inflows like proposed in this video could help against that happening but I doubt it. There is already an huge amount of salt lurking in the soil above the water table out there. I think enough water to green the inland would certainly be enough water to mobilise that ground salt.
If there is a salt layer in the ground deep below the surface, it stays there without seeping up to the surfact if ground in between is dry. If irrigation wets the ground down to this layer, the salt will slowly creep up to the surface and make it useless for farming. This has happened in some places in Australia, so before investing in a new irrigation scheme, check for deep salt layers first!
Let's maybe talk about the current 'food crisis' in Australia - i.e. most of the food produced is going into export, while the local population has to just 'tighten the belt' and loosen purse strings to afford the measly leftovers (and this is just the tip of the iceberg of monstrosities committed over the years). What is being done to the inhabitants of this magnificent land is appalling!
Your country’s entire history is founded on doing awful shit to the inhabitants of that great land. Why are you surprised? Sounds like y’all today are getting off pretty easy compared to the aborigines.
@@googleuser3163 American detected. Not everybody views the world through the "orange man bad" worldview. These issues have nothing to do with Trump or America.
Rather than trying to alter nature work with it,the American plains have been turned into dustbowls by exploitive corporate agriculture . The European settlers of Australia who don't consider themselves Asians should stop trying to dominate a larger group of people. You will eventually be assimilated.
The interior is inhabited by many Aboriginals. They prefer living in the desert and not being part of the white Australia. And now they will be invaded again in the desert. How sad💔
One thing to remember is that the region around Lake Eyre is extremely salty, it's an old sea bottom after all. I've always thought an easier way to restore the ancient sea would be a pipeline through South Australia. Lake Eyre is around 150 feet below sea level so a pipeline from 50 feet underwater in South Australia would simply drain sea water into the Lake. It would literally syphon the water. The inland sea would expand until evaporation matched the water coming in through the pipe. It's cheaper and if it's a mistake, easy to rectify. Put a hole in the pipeline and the syphoning stops and the sea would shrink back to current levels.
@@jasonhockly8655 So? Use it for salt mining. I think the greater benefit would be the extra rain over the central region. For that matter, if it gets salty enough like the Dead Sea it becomes a tourist attraction.
I'm a forestry engineer. From what I see, the point of this is to "restore" or better said "improve" the indland as much as possible, so constructing rivers from the north covers much more area, therefore greening much more land, which is the whole point and also creating the possibility of hydroelectricity production. The disadvantage would be that we as professionals in ecosystems managing can't really predict what will actually happen, even though we can predict the basic consequences with high certainty. Also, the current ecosystems would certainly change a lot, probably for the better taking in consideration our context but that'd be subjective if you ask conservationists as some species could disappear. Now, when it comes to the salt in the soils, it isn't really such a bad thing, considering there are many crops or plants that resist salty soil, but it would depend on agronomists and economists.
No the problem is, once you started, you can't stop it. Because the water is salty. When it would dry up again, this salt will get blown around by wind and ruin even more land by salting it up. And the lake itself would be so salty, not much use would be created. Bring in salt in the area is just a bad thing. If anything you would need desalinated water, maybe produced with solar power or something like that.
@@3komma141592653 Sorry mate, I wasn't clear. The idea isn't so much to use the inland sea (except maybe for salt mining), but to let it evaporate. The lake constantly gets refreshed through the pipeline and the evaporated water falls elsewhere. It's to increase rainfall across the dry centre. And putting more salt there won't make any difference, it's already a completely dry salt flat. Except in flood times. Like I said it's a dry sea bottom.
As an Australian I have known about this idea since I was a child and have known its infeasible almost as long. It would be about as successful as the plan to dam the Mediterranean, what could ever go wrong.
@@somethinglikethat2176 there’s nothing in ‘the plan’ under consideration lol It’s a debunked 80+ year old plan, not under consideration by any level of government. The most recent ‘regreening the outback’ plan was launched a billionaire back in the 80s and proposed digging a trench from Port Augusta in SA to lake eyre to feed seawater to the lake to increase precipitation. But that much cheaper and quicker idea was also completely shut down
I'm Australian too and I've always loved the idea of this plan. We're sitting on a piece of land bigger than continental Europe yet most of it is totally uninhabitable and unarable. It wasn't always like this, just a few million years ago australia had much greater forest coverage, now the sand that replaced it is still surprisingly nutrient rich. Even just 100,000 years ago right before humans arrived much more of Australia was covered in the rainforests that now only exist in tiny pocket's in northern queensland. Australia has a COMPLETELY different ecology to what it had only 100,000 years ago, very recently in ecological time, and a lot of that is due to our influence. Maybe if we could realise the plan to saturate the desert we could revive a bit of the past.
@@ospritely8144 That rain forest you mention relied on different weather patterns, for example 3000 years ago Egypt had a lot of savannah either side of the Nile, today not so much, so even if we watered the desert it wouldn't be permanent.
My brother and I had this discussion not long ago. My idea was more around utilizing large pipes to transport the excess flood waters, avoiding the evaporation issue. Basically using regular solar powered pumping stations and reservoirs along the way as needed. The issue always seemed to come down to the economics and especially the huge initial investment for such a project. The question would always lead- Would fellow Aussies be willing to pay for a nation building project that very likely their own generation wouldn't see the returns from but every generation thereafter would? Basically, it's the same question of every nation building project, past, present and future.
Will never work . Do you know anything about sceice. I'm veyr intellegent , and I know your plan will never work. let us very smrat people do the thikning.
Good idea. We can't get to the end state in one go. We will have to implements lots of mini solutions along the way. This will slowly expand habitability. There will however be lessons to be learned along the way.
@@monkeydluffy3769 it seems obvious: water volume is far too small, rainfall location is unpredictable, distances are too vast. The scales are all obviously wrong.
Brad Lancaster has come up with decentralized ways to harvest rainwater. Some many Aussies are already familiar with but I believe he came up with some great ideas. China has centralized it at the expense of decentralized solutions and made a huge mess of it...
Wasn't it the murray that the retarded gov gave a massive amount of water to a bunch of foreign folk for their dumb farm which ended up destroying a large amount of land, animals plus causing a town to die off.
We'd be dealing with a climate that includes air temperatures above 45C and soil temps above 60C and humidities so low the dew point is negative. Not much will survive that beyond the existing indigenous vegetation.
Yes I am a geopolitical youtuber and every week I come across articles talking about Australian climate change. Australia is one of the top countries that will get affected by climate change the most.
Grow irrigated winter crops, spray irrigation, common place in Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa. Livestock still run there now, QLD is more habitable than people think.
I think this is totally possible. I am from Texas and we've pretty much turned our dry plains and deserts to fertile farmland by making countless small reservoirs. I wonder what one big one could do!
It's not empty desert, it's an ecosystem that has evolved over millennia and destroying it so Australia can export food to an overpopulated world is yet another idiotic idea.
Sorry Caspian Report, but as a New Zealander, we are right next to Australia, and literally nobody is saying they should do this. This concept is wildly off base from any sort of serious infrastructure discussions. Let me know if you do a video on high speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne
There are members of the National Party and independents from North Queensland demanding it. They periodically demand it be looked into in return for voting on other legislation.
Yeah I haven't heard about the Bradfield plan in years. It's more of an old thought experiment than something that's actually going to happen. There's plenty of interesting stuff being talked about here and more to the point far more interesting stuff that's NOT being done. Australia's geography and infrastructure has so much potential, but it's all a huge mess. Now that I think about it I'm shocked Caspian Report didn't talk about the countries absolutely pathetic, 50 years out of date rail. Or how failing to invest in renewables has cost the economy about 12 trillion$ so far and about another trillion each year. Or how my governments foreign policy has done nothing but piss off and antagonise our neighbours, trading partners and allies for ten years. Sorry about that by the way. We're such cunts to you.
@Burble, political parties quite often adopt unworkable infrastructure projects as election policies and then drop them when feasibility is conducted. As I said, this is not serious infrastructure discussion, its the sort of talk that your dad likes to talk about at the breakfast table in hopes of australia being a future superpower. Its wank plain and simple. Might as well be the same as NZ reclaiming the underwater continent of Zealandia.
@@michaela2634 People playing god without knowing what they're doing never backfires. I just hope we get real experts to do it and politician interference is minimal
"It came down to the experts to spoil the fun" Sigh, look, I'm Australian and a scientist (earth science / geology so, relevant). Whilst Bradfield was a great civil engineer, perfect for bridges and railways, his scientific and environmental understanding was lacking (case in point was the evaporation calculation). The Bradfield Scheme is, and always was, a silly fantasy. Advancements in climate controlled vertical farming is both environmentally and economically superior.
100% This idea is a fantasy and it's actually something constantly sprouted by alt right chuds in this country. It's disappointing to see it getting any sort of mainstream traction.
Climate controlled farming will always be more expensive than outdoor farming, even if you automated the process. One idea I've read is to build the farms underground where the temperature is constant, but tunneling a bunch of holes still represent a large initial investment. I don't think vertical farming will be feasible without gov subsidies.
Farming does not have to be purely extractive or environmentally damaging. Expanding farm land with an understanding of soil health and nutrient cycling can also expand ecological benefits to the entire region. Keeping farms as part of nature is much more beneficial than warehouses full of crops and not used for anything else.
This seemed a well researched piece. I grew up in Australia in the 60's as the Snowy sheme came to fruition and as the decades passed there appeared significant environmental damage as a result of changes in the direction of water flow and intensification of agriculture along the Murray River. I went to UNE where there was an Ag Science department and I recall students discussing many of the issues covered in the report. Time and again, the mention of the poor nutrient content of the soil was mentioned. History also records that widespread pastoral activity took place across the state of NSW beyond the Darling River in the late 19th/early 20th century. The grazing livestock degraded the land to such an extent that grazing activities ceased and the land became marginal at best. The Australian environment is fragile and European settlement has brought largescale changes and damage to it. If nothing else, the good intentions of past schemes has been a demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Not to forget that I read in this biography book of Australia, concerning both Aboriginal and European settlement, that the Outback of NSW, from Cobar all the way to the Darling River and beyond did have this *top soil* layer that was fertile, pretty much like the Great Plains of the USA. However, whereas the top soil of the Great Plains was over 3 meters (10ft) thick, in Western NSW it was about 40cm (+1ft). Yet, like the Dust Bowl that occurred on the Great Plains in part of overgrazing by cattle and removing lots of native vegetation, the same thing happened in Western NSW. Only in the latter case, the fertile top soil ended up being totally lost, due to the fact that it was already not that thick. On top of clearing the native vegetation, like Saltbush, that kept the *salinity* levels low and the land arable and livable by all sorts of flora & fauna, the levels went up after the landclearing and made the land unuseable. Both for animals, including cattle and farming crops. Right now researching have begun planting large swathes of Kangaroo Grass, in an effort to make these areas productive and livable again. Due to the hardy nature of this plant species and that it could lower the salinity levels to such an extent that other plants might grow again and will attract animals too.
@@victorsamsung2921 yeah id agree you are probably right. Huge areas of the country were also impenetrable forests, these areas are now where the large cities are. Its mind boggling just how much land was cleared, much of it needlessly or excessively.
@@manchagojohnsonmanchago6367 Amen! Take the State of Victoria as an example. Almost, if not 93% exact, of the total land area was covered with forests at the time of European settlement in the early 1800s. You know, forests like those you find at the Black Spur Range, Mt. Dandenong, Yarra Valley, Great Ocean Road etc. That is more than 210.000 km2 of Victoria's total 238.000km2. Most of it has been cleared or lost since. Everywhere you go you can see it. Along the Murray River, the Western Victorian Volcanic Province and Philip Island etc.
Yeah, it's not like we haven't built the longest water supply pipeline in the world at 560km from Perth to Kalgoorlie already... But stay dumb about your own country, kids.
Boys, with this water we can operate four times as many breweries. If we complete this project we may never have to be sober again. This is Australia's Moonshot, nay, their destiny.
@@pupdaddie Agree but this one would be uneconomic, small amounts of water passing huge amouints of more fertile land in Queensland, better used there. The rest is speculative padding. Because a project is feasible from an engineering pov, can be hopelessly uneconomic. Not so with the WA pepelins, for domestic and small industrial use in highly lucrative, concentrated gold mines.
I have severe doubts about the Bradfield Scheme. Soil salinity is already a huge problem in this country, and I doubt that this huge and expensive project can avoid that same pitfall.
I'm an Australian & its not one of our genuine projects. For a start our experience in the Murray Darling is a catastrophic example of river & environmental damage from flood irrigation etc. But more importantly our deserts are unique environments that are to be preserved as much as possible. Unfortunately another problem is, regardless of all the billions of tons of flood waters that come from the northern river systems, all the water is very salty by the time it reaches the middle of Australia. The areas are so vast & so dry that it would be difficult to pull off such a project.
There was several attempts to create inner sea in the African Sahara desert in Egypt by connecting the Mediterranean sea with the Qattara depression in the middle of the western desert. I think Caspian Report should cover this issue in a separate video :)
@@Zoanodar I think my ancestors , the Pharaohs, had managed to construct a very well established irrigation system to connect the Nile basin with the Fayoum basin.
@@zizogadolio It's amusing how the Ancient Egyptians and Romans etc. Understood the importance of innovating their water-based infrastructure and yet many advanced countries today (the US in particular) can't even be bothered to maintain what they've already got.
@@mrgaudy1954 They had the forsight and immovable culture and ideaology that spanned thousands of years and we can't plan for next month. Think about this, two structures can be standing side by side identical in everyway and every detail and be dated to over 1000 years apart. We can only dream of having that kind of assurance in our existence now.
There was a similar idea in Western Australia to use large canals to funnel water from the Ord river project down to Perth... again, it was considered ridiculous due to the evaporation rates. in fact, the rate of evaporation would have meant not a single drop would have made it.
old enough to remember the article in the Sunday Times about the man-made mountain range down the border between the east west to re green the outback? Hollow mountains filled with water, and the updraft of air currents there would naturally create rain clouds, (cite watching air currents rise up the face of the great pyramid at Giza). cost prohibitive to the Nth degree, but yeah, not the first time they had such grand idea's
I want someone to make a new kind of forest. An agricultural forest, instead of using non-native mono-crops, we could use native fruits, vegetables and other vegetation in the right combination to improve soil fertility. Once pests enter such as kangaroos, buffalo, and deer we could then hunt the animals for more food. We also don't have to deforest and existing area we could start using compost and manure on a less fertil area of land. The water problems could be solved by using flood water and to stop evaporation we could cover the canals/ basin's with solar panels. Plz leave your thoughts.
@@youtubeoqlk5488 it's all about yields. And what you described doesn't have that high a yield, so it's not done (unless you're maintaining a forest for other reasons).
Very good and well researched video. As an Australian I'll touch the one part of the topic you don't because of a (fair) desire not to make your videos too political: effectively all the water infrastructure terraforming plans that have come up in Australia in the last two decades are climate change denialist attempts to divert attention from the need to reduce emissions. There is a very small but very powerful minority of big agriculture interests (particularly cotton) pushing these changes despite no wide spread support in Australia. The increasing undermining of the National party primary vote by independents and SFF is a reflection of this reality. Water management is a completely toxic topic in Australia because the current government refuses to touch any policy that reduces (or even cuts growth of) water use due to their big agriculture donors. The opposition refuses to touch it because any attempts to pass such policy will be framed in the media as anti-farmers (despite local communities generally supporting reform) due to media ownership concentration and it's not a key topic to die over. Welcome to the 'lucky country' folks. Too bad we're driving all our luck in to the ground and digging any value out of the ground and exporting for multinational profits. Why didn't we nationalise the resources industry like Norway or Saudi Arabia again?
Utter Commie Crap! Your argument is lost with your ideology! If you want a piece of the mining wealth, buy some shares in Rio Tinto, Fortescue, BHP (biggest mining company in the world), Newcrest for gold, Santos for gas, Ozminerals for copper; all Australian companies. Nationalisation would be the end of these businesses by implementation of non-commercial management. You're denying the success of the Snowy Hydro scheme, which has created the food bowl in the Murray Darling basin, mainly for horticulture & rice, and producing numerous attractive liveable regions in the process, while still allowing environmental flows to sustain the original rivers.
I've been living in Cairns for 2 years and I think this would be a great idea. Especially when you think that 12 meters of rain falls in Tully and in a good year. The reason the vast majority of Australia is dry is because of the great dividing range causing a huge rain shadow. All we'd have to do is create a water course from Tully towards the interior. I don't think it has to involve dams.
Mosquitos are already pretty bad around Cairns... I, for one, agree that we should make all of Queensland a mosquito and midge larva paradise, not just the coastal regions.
Tully is like 20 metres above sea level, I guess there is hundreds of kilometres of land 100 metres above sea level on that path, pushing shit uphill I do believe
You'd need a mountain *range* , which ain't happening unless some giant space monster lays a mountain range sized bog that extends from Broome to Whyalla.
@@Banana_Split_Cream_Buns there are mountain ranges in australia, but they're all close ish to the coast, flinders ranges used to be taller than mount everest but never had it's own eco system.
Well the Bradfield plan was to take water from the Tully which is a permanent river. Up along the Qld coast there is enormous rainfall and the tiny little rivers that flow from the mountains east tend to have magnitudes more water in them than the great outback rivers. The idea was that the permanent, massive flows of the Tully could be dammed, tunneled and diverted west rather than letting them flow east and turn the inland rivers into permanent rivers. But still, as covered by Shirvan, evaporation is a huge issue and generally these rivers only flow when they are in flood (and the deluge is enough to overcome the evaporation rates, such that the water can reach Lake Eyre)
we have got a whole lot of useless land here in australia, good for nothing but mining !!! but i live in the green east and am so happy my parents brought me here as a small child, it's a great place to live, life is easy and happy here !!!
"geopolitical concerns eventually drove Canberra..." *shows footage of Sydney* Love how they decided to build a capital at Canberra as a middle ground and distinguish the city as its own representation of the country, and people STILL think the capital is Sydney or Melbourne.
as an australian, id much rather have water piped to outback communities rather than alter the enviroment with large scale terraforming projects. We already have cattle out that way so piping it would be enough to support them.
"To another dam on the Herbert" The US has the Hoover Dam, and now Australia has the Herbert Dam.... Herbert Hoover: *Perfectly balanced, as all things should be* I mean Gaddafi managed to create an ambitious system of pipes that supplied fresh water across Libya from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer so if that was possible, then this idea isn't too far fetched
Could you do a report on the once-great Murray-Darling system? In earlier times, Paddle steamers regularly plied the Darling river, via the Murray, carrying supplies from Adelaide up into southern Queensland and carrying wool and grain back to Adelaide for export. At some point it was decided that cotton and rice were excellent arid land crops, hence only a trickle remains in the river, with parts of the Darling reduced to a series of puddles in summer. It has been said that Cubby station's massive dam holds 9 times the volume of Sydney harbour. There are still a lot of rusted lifting bridges from before the time water became "managed", still being used as roads in the permanent down position. There's a new bridge at Wilcannia, but the old lifter still stands next to it. A quick look in G. Maps street view gives some idea of how grand the river once was. Meanwhile further south on the Murray, entire forests of River Red Gums, which evolved to thrive on annual flooding, have died from dehydration, and the Koorong National park at the Murray river mouth is little more than damp dunes.
"Once great"? It used to dry up. There are photos taken at Swan Hill where they were holding races on the river bed. Having said that, you're totally correct about farming rice and cotton in a desert.
@@JohnJ469 which year was that severe drought? Drying up was a rare occurence before "management", now the Darling river is a permanent trickle, if that.
As a desert resident, I was waiting for the temperature to factor in. Anyone who lives in a desert or otherwise arid land know that water is precious and elusive when it wants to be. The original plan would solve one issue but it doesnt really solve itself. But yeah I would love to see any terraforming effort in my lifetime. Hopefully something is worked out and approved of by all potential stakeholders and not just those with political power
The problem here is actually salt which is why the water into the central australia is so desperately needed to maintain and stabilize the current ecology. Australia is constantly salting from sea breeze and this is where the current desertification is coming from. The centre needs water in the aquifers, and growth in saltbush to stabilise the current situation as the ancient protective layer has been wiped out by sand erosion and cloven foot animals. Farmers can only do so much but there is a lot of Australia outside of the rain shadow regions. The vast majority of Australias' water transfer system is below sea level and this is why the water movement is actually possible in each of the three water movement plans. Oh and the run off into the sea around the great barrier reef after the bradfield plan would be far less, as the issue there is exposed iron sand soil run off, the bradfield plan would actually divert the heavy floods away from the coast limiting the run off.
"The vast majority of Australia is below sea level..." What?! According to Geoscience Australia 0.11% of land area (or 8500km2) is below sea level. Not what I'd call vast majority. Desertification in a large part comes from the size of the continent, latitude and even ocean currents but not much to do with salt form sea breeze. There is a belt of desert regions on both the Southern and Northern Hemisphere. A large part of Australia just happens to fall into the southern one. ???
@@sandman0123 sandor you are right. I apologise. I meant that the water transfer region is below sea level. This area is the cave, salt layer, sandstone, and porus regional geology which is where the vast majority of water actually flows in regional areas. The internal salt flats which alone are more than 1% of the landmass are at depths well below sea level. Lake eyre is listed as sealevel in that report but is normally below sealevel when dry for example. You were right for correcting me and again I apologise. Edit: i have corrected the original comment.
@@sandman0123 i forgot to fully explain the saltificaton problem in Australia. Sorry this is 102 Australian geology and I forget others don't know it. Australian geology is very different and incredibly old. This place is ridiculously tectonically stable and has been moving to be a desert actually measured in geological scales. The desertification you see in other nations really isn't caused the same way here as anywhere else. Australia is huge, and well flat to put no fine a point of it. This means the water in the air just doesn't normally discharge into the superheated heart as there aren't enough hills and mountains to allow the water to fall in huge amounts. No alpines here until you hit the east coast. Because the salt can ride the winds as sea spray, it will fall first in rain and dew vapour across the nation and through the joy of chemical physics means that Australia is always gaining more salt from sea spray on its surface than is ever washed out. It has left Australia with a crust of salt across the nation, and several super saturated salt aquifers in south australia, beneath the ones we generally recognise. Coastal regions are less likely to be salt affected than regional areas because at least they can expell the salt with the rain back to the sea. If the aquifers in the regional areas sink the salt crust becomes a major problem as plants try to reach the water but hit the barrier and simply die. If there is enough water in the system the salt moves with the water flow to a deeper point instead. Too much water discharged too quickly instead pulls the salt to the surface leaving salt patches that only saltbush can rectify. This regional salt isn't generally ever going away, but it can get captured in lower soil layers, or move to salt caverns or salt flats in the limestone. If we get lucky it hits the Murray Darling river system or other regional river systems and with time and flood rain even moves out to sea. Saltificaton is such a problem that most of our local plants have gained salt tolerance, and our farmers use special farming practices for dryland farming including salt resistant crops just to handle the problem. Salt is always a problem underlying the nations ecology so any disruption, say climate change, is magnified because of the ecologies fragility. That is why more water matters. The regular water allows for a barrier against environmental disruption and while it would increase the rain shadow region it would stabilize the salt issue first. Lots of regular water into the system allows for the salt layers movement to a lower point not a sudden eruption to the surface as we see in the wake of flood events. Enough water in the Murray Darling and the underlying salt issue in that area becomes moot. Hope that helps.
Of course, the objective doesn't have to be industrial agriculture. We could make the place more pleasant and habitable, while using far less water on aquaponic agricultural methods instead.
Turning the area into a wetland has far greater potential benefits than trying to industrial farm a former arid land. But of course, that would be thinking ahead, which is asking alot of the government that killed the great barrier reef and opened up the south sea to oil drilling.
- *"We could make the place more pleasant and habitable"* For us. The plants, animals and insects that live there as it is now (and have done for tens of thousands of years, if not longer) will be either forced out or die just so we can have more places to comfortably make a mess. Human industry and pollution arnt the only things that can destroy ecosystems. Messing around with nature in _any_ way can seriously mess things up. I wonder when people, including environmentalists, will finally learn that lesson?
@@SvendleBerries This project would at least partially counterbalance some of the negative impacts of human activities. Poor water management in arid areas is the biggest of today's world. Bringing more water inlands would replenish some of the water that humans used and wasted. Of course projects need to carefully consider all possible, particularly salinization and accumulation of agrochemicals and other pollutants.
@@SvendleBerries Just like we humans had a positive impact on biodiversity with our slash and burn agriculture for ten thousand years, this project will do the same. This is what a beaver does, but on a massive scale. And that is wonderful for biodiversity. Yes, some die, but many more get the chance to live. We are thus then doing the opposite of our usual mass extinction.
Australia doesn't worry about geopolitics as the narrator claims. Also, the part of the desert described that would be made arable used to be an ancient ocean. There is so much salt there that it would take at least a hundred years to manage it to low enough levels to support plant life.
I think it’s better to build a fast rail system to connect towns and be able to move people and goods across states quickly. Then probably setup agricultural land beside these transport routes as a start.
All of Australia's arable land is already in use. Extending railway lines and increasing the size of inland towns must result in less agricultural production, and the loss of wildlife habitat.
Australia is the perfect place for rail. Everything is exactly the right distance apart to make all types of rail travel ideal. Shame passenger travel was gutted and replaced with the most wasteful forms of transport possible: personal automobiles and planes
@@TAP7a Personal vehicles are fine especially in regional Australia. No sane person wants to live in a world of centrally planned communal transport where you can't even do something as simple as a road trip with the family.
@@MrSmith-ve6yo lol, why would you do a road trip. Driving for hours in a heat, packed up with so many people? No thank you. I will keep myself to fast train travel for my family holiday destinations. You can even stop through multiple stations to visit places for some nice family tourism, there is no reason to waste resources and life on cars.
@@mjm3091 Never heard of the saying, "It's the journey, not the destination", I see. Not to mention that 99.999% of places will never be a near a trainline, such is the nature of a narrow rail corridor cutting across a broad land area. And nobody's forcing you in particular to take a road trip anyway so it's discomforts need not be yours. Besides, you've exceeded your carbon credit limit for this month so you won't be allowed to use the high speed rail until the following month.
"Can Australia's outback be turned into an oasis l, or is it just a mirage?" Oh my goodness, how do you come up with these stellar lines for EVERY video? They really stick with me even after the video and just overall makes the video more enjoyable and memorable. Keep it up! 👍
Maybe it would be an idea to do some less intensive agriculture? Making permaculture a large scale national policies would help a lot with Australia's problems.
Yeah, decentralise food production. Do away with the insanity of transporting food in trucks halfway across the country. Every town should have a massive permaculture farm, which would provide jobs for the unemployed, and healthy fresh food. Then households could start there own small projects instead of maintaining useless lawns and gardens. Of course the last thing the government wants is for people to be self sufficient with food.
@@rexnemorensis8154 The government doesn't determine who gets what food, it's just that existing permaculture systems are either inefficient or not very profitable. I think the idea of permaculture and more "decentralized" food production is great in many ways, but consider the consequences of implementing it on a large scale. Three immediate problems stick out to me: With the current state of permaculture, we simply wouldn't be able to feed everyone due to the decreased efficiency; urban areas would rapidly depopulate, as urban living would be unviable without large scale, industrial food production; consumers would have their choice in produce heavily restricted by region and season (perhaps that's not a big deal to you, but I can think of some people I know that would be pissed that they can't eat their precious avocado toast in the middle of a New England winter).
I'm Australian and I reject Scott Moronson's plan to green the Outback. The Outback is dry and arid because Father Nature has decreed for the Outback to be dry and arid and we have no right to interfere in that decree, just as the Soviets had no right to dry up the beautiful Aral Sea. Father Nature always knows best.
@@Rishi123456789 Father Nature didn't plant a single one of the plants required to feed you, so unless you think that your very existence is an affront to nature itself that's a bit too simplistic of a worldview.
@@AngryF4ce Yes. A total transition over to permaculture would be ridiculous, but I think integrated it for towns would be ideal. Obviously cities would still require industrial agriculture, but problems like the vulnerability of supply chains, as demonstrated by the lockdowns, could be alleviated by maybe like a 30% self reliance in towns by growing fresh produce, and would allow a diversity in crop genetics (heirloom species etc.) Also there's a projected rise in elderly populations which usually move out of cities to coastal towns, which could provide a volunteer workforce and keep them healthy along with unemployed youth (decreasing crime and mental health problems etc.). Governments are moving in the wrong direction though, with plans for mega 'smart cities' and plans to restrict people from nature, creating an inherently more unstable system. Self sufficiency and independence is seem as a threat, people aren't allowed to keep chickens or grow medicines and most lawn herbicides target natural plant medicines like dandelions. Ultimately towns and suburban areas could be redesigned into an integrated sustainable, village style communities, and even create biodiesel, textiles, etc. Cities and rural areas could still follow an industrial model.
I think the wording 'restoring the inland sea' gives this more justification than it deserves. It makes it sound like the native fauna and indigenous population and obstacles for something that should inevitably be (even though the sea existed in the Cretaceous period).
I live in the outback of Queensland on the thomson river and around every 11 years the area turns into a green paradise from la nina rain falls like it is at the moment its a natural cycle the biggest benefit of this would to replenish the great artisan basins underground water supplies in turn raising the water table and restoring moisture to the outback which would increase rainfall to a harsh semi arid environment that a hundred years ago had a much higher water table and a much higher annual rainfall also the great artisan basin is the largest fresh water reserve on earth that needs to be protected from worse things ie hydraulic fracture gas extraction that cannot ever be aloud to devastate this precious resource for future of the Australian containent in conclusion if managed properly this could do the natural cycle wonders but humanity is greediness would be the scheme's downfall foreign ownership of Australia is already devastating this beautiful land google cubby station that was sold to the Chinese a cotton farm that is bigger than some European countrys it's sickening
When was the Last time Your Place saw Greenery?(Just Curious) But I think even if everything goes right you guys would still face problem your Country is filled with Most Dangerous animals Imaginable after Amazon and if it becomes a Rain forest type from Desert not only it will harm the animal live they're and some of whom might extinct.. But the biggest challenge will be how would you counter Dangerous animals from your Neighborhood? I mean Literally if Australia Sift any they're population they're more and more Tropical predators like alligator , Deadly Spiders and Snakes would also move they're? No One would want to live middle of Danger for life .... first two or three years may seem Golden but if you don't take Steps about Animals then it would a Game over match for Humans they're and also for some native Species like we get hard time to deal with Changing Climate those Animals will also found it hard and some of the rare who are already struggling for Humans and they're wierd Animal Invasion would just die and go Extinct.. And because Tropical area is just north Alligator Spider and snakes would love to move they're it's like a Gold Rush for them
It’s kind of uncanny how I just watched a video about China’s similar plan and the problems with it, impracticality, cost and destroying a healthy ecosystem that does exist in the desert.
@@Michael_Chater I'm from the Uk and even I know it's pronounced Lake Air -"Lake AyRee" was like nails on a chalkboard. Props to this guy for making this video anyway, It's not like we're researching and producing content like this.
I remember reading a story about Australia greening their interior but when they did it salt bubbled up and made growing anything impossible even native plants
Yes - this has happened in parts of Australia, particularly the Murray Darling basin which has been subject to irrigation and has a very salty sub-surface in parts. I've seen the damage of too much irrigation in these areas and many rice farms for example have been abandoned and turned into cattle & sheep pastures instead
False! There is no environmental crisis in the creat barrier reef. The corals are white by nature, when not overgrown by other organisms. The reef is growing and bigger than ever.
In a time of changing climate, and especially sea level, the Bradfield plan should not be forgotten. But the priority should not be an Inland Sea for the purpose of farming -- that is decades away. The priority should be to change the micro-climates of inland Austrialia, even if it means augmenting the original scheme presented here with Ocean water, made all the more possible with raised Sea-levels. Evaportion will be huge over such an immense, hot and dry locale, but it will have to fall as rain at some point in the high-lands. If this is never attempted, inland Australia will burn anyway, and there will no crops to speak of, ever again.
Very interesting, I was reminded of the Soviet Union’s scheme(s) in Central Asia, which led to the diminution of the Aral Sea! Man’s ingenuity to alter his physical environment needs to be tempered with humility. However once momentum behind such schemes builds up, it may become difficult to stop especially as it could be promoted as flood control/prevention. As an understatement, Australia is hardly in the vanguard,when it comes to environmentalism.
@@deanpd3402 Yep, we're doing the opposite of the Soviets - trying to create one. "It's too hard, let's not try. There's no point learning through small failures along the journey".
Considering how the government has tormented the people with their handling of health matters, I would fight their efforts to be involved with water issues.
Very well put. Hubris was our downfall, if only we had trusted nature to do what it does best and just assisted. I hope others can learn from or avoid our species mistakes.
Irrigating the interior is going to severely damage the coastal ecosystems in Australia. The Murray is hanging on by a thread, if that. The East coast has been dealing with flooding for decades and it's only getting worse. There's a reason why we have semi-tropical geography at the same latitudes as what is temperate in the Americas and Africa. There are often water restrictions in places like the Gold Coast, or northern NSW. Most of the East Coast has high water tables which will be massively impacted by the change of water pressure across the Great Dividing Range. We don't need to regreen our deserts, we need to regreen the areas that were originally green. The areas which were thriving forests before they were cleared for timbers and for pasture. I'm not anti-capitalism. In fact, I think there is greater long term value (including economic) in reviving existing pastures, and not attempting to regreen the desert. The best example is in the example given in the video. The Ord reservoirs are not re-greening the desert, they actually rehydrated old forests that had been turned into pasture.
What you said specifically here "The Ord reservoirs are not re-greening the desert, they actually rehydrated old forests that had been turned into pasture." Will go over everyone's head as they don't appreciate the simple importance of saturating land mass through reservoirs. The amount of constant flow needed and the science behind the exact right size to not only feed the human population, our farmland but also top up and pressurize water tables(At their many many levels) Is not understood. All that and more must happen at a perfectly calculated rate if you want to push it to its limits, which these people clearly want to do. In my experience via years of research and fascination with water is that the its always better to build many small reservoirs and dams in exactly the right position using nature as your only guide. Not politicians, not grand ideas or needs. If nature is telling you no, listen or fall at the wayside.
You only have to look at Geoff Lawtons greening the desert project in Jordan to realise that with the right actions and available resources that a good portion of this is actually possible. It just will take a bit of time.
If it doesn’t make short term profit for corporations, democratic nations won’t bother investing in it. All the less democratic nations are already doing this work. Check out the Chinese, African and Arabian greening projects. They require long term patient investment but eventually will benefit their nations in self sufficiency. Authoritarian governments can dictate speedy transitions into this type of investment and make it happen by mobilising their population to all participate, unlike western democratic nations. There are obviously pros and cons to all forms of government.
@@PikachooUpYou Get real, even poor communities in Africa are doing it. You don't need money, you just need people. If you bother to do a search right here, you would know how wrong you are.
I like a lot of Geoff Lawtons' ideas, as well as Peter Andrews'. I think the best way to green the outback would be to create leaky weirs/check/sand dams along the creeks and rivers that feed into Lake Eyre and the surrounding lakes at X kilometre intervals. It might take 100 years after they have been constructed to grow biomass a create permanent slow-flowing streams but it would be worth it
@@brad1669 Peter Andrews has definitely done a lot of good also. I wouldn't mind to do one of his natural sequence farming courses one day. It's a hard one for someone inexperienced like myself to say but you could well be on the right track with that idea. The hardest thing is getting any government body to listen to men like these and actually implement long term plans that aren't solely based on their next damn election win.
Should do the next Caspian Report on the new security pac power play between Beijing and Honiara and the potential impact on the sealanes to the Australian and New Zealand population centres 😊
The Solomon Islands should be a British colony again, because they clearly can't govern themselves properly by allowing an ever-increasingly belligerent China to set up a military base there.
I have been to the Solomon’s before and I find it both fascinating and inevitable. So much of their economy already relies on China, lots of the stores and restaurants in Honiara are owned by Chinese people.
flood plane harvesting has caused masive damage thoughout the out back, massive fish die-offs and blue-green algae has destroyed so much. This appears to do the same thing.
Insane it is! With Scomo and Palletjack you would be lucky if they could work out that there was shit in a sewage plant, let a lone understand what you are proposing.
This seems like a bigger version of what the Saudis are trying to do to modernize and make their country more habitable but with less focus on agriculture and more on getting fresh drinking water
Yes! I am a geopolitical youtuber and i did read an article that was describing the similarities between the Saudi Arabian and the Australian infrastructure project!
This scheme was proposed by Bradfield in 1938, and is suggested occasionally. It has two main problems. The amount of water is less than he calculated and the water needs to flow uphill in some areas. As a result it is uneconomic.
yet somehow we get water 450km inland and half a kilometre above sea level so the people who live in WA's goldfields don't die of thirst. I hear they use these high falutin' inventions called "pumps" to push the water through some new fangled contraption called "pipes." Signs and wonders!
As an Australian myself, I find this plan to be very intriguing. I can imagine flourishing grasslands and fields around Uluru, and perhaps Alice Springs becoming a sprawling city due to more agricultural production that isn’t limited by the dry red soil. It’d be more like America or Europe with more settlements inland rather than most of us being stuck up on the East Coast. I’d be glad to let this plan make way, and it’d be a thrilling accomplishment which might make this country prosper.
As an Australian and an environmental scientist I can say you mustn't have been to Alice Springs yet. That landscape IS a flourishing grassland...seasonally, when the rains come. All of the plants and animals out there have adapted to dry seasonal, cyclical conditions. There's beauty in the ephemeral nature of life out there, and the red of the dry is as amazing and thr verdant green of the wet. This idea that everything in Australia is shit until we get our grubby hands in and change it is what I like least about our country. Take a helicopter ride over the West MacDonnell Ranges and see the cycads and the rock wallabies, or witness an Eyrean Grasswren calling on top of a sand dune at dawn, and then come back and tell me how much better the Centre would be with more Stockland Shopping Centres and fucking lawn ornaments.
Australia needs to do some kind of inland water diversion, the inland areas are on the path to complete inhability, this land was once flush with wildlife, there's no reason to not return it to its former glory if the downsides can be curtailed.
There are actually underwater reservoirs that are remnants of the great inland sea, such as the Great Artesian Basin. The issue here is that coal seam gas extraction and other types of mining threaten the viability of the water for drinking or agriculture. Edit: I'm commenting as I watch. It seems bore water might support a small town but perhaps not mass agriculture. Tunnels might very well be a reasonable way to transport flood waters or desalinated water but the costs required to construct those tunnels would be immense and very disruptive existing ecosystems and land.
Water diversion is the current problem, because rich twats use floodplains to grow cotton (very high water needs), stop it travelling downstream and refuse to report the water they take
As someone who loves in one of the regions they want to 'greenify', they've been balling ideas like this about for decades, it won't happen. Biggest couple issues is a lot of desert areas have high water tables and lots of salt, one wrong move and your inland freshwater lakes become the next dead sea. And the other is people really underestimate temperatures, in summer 45*C is not uncommon, but can easily drop into the negatives during winter, realistically, if you even do manage to create this huge food bowl, what food grows in those sort of temperature ranges?
@@pewpewTN Comparing Australian outback with America will bring you undone very quickly. They are 2 completely different places. In saying that farming is done very successfully in the extremes Australia does throw up. Farmers for generations have dealt with years of drought (6 to 8 years is not uncommon) then flooding rains. Super hot to super cold, super dry to super wet, that is Australia. Australia has some amazingly furtile plains. They just need to be managed properly which greedy corperations after short term gain and the goverment hungry for the money don't do. For the land and the people it has over the last 50 years become a lose lose battle not many of the city and coastal fringe dwellers are unaware of. Their steak is found in the supermarket where it came from or how it was produced they have no idea.
tbf the riverina region in NSW is a massive food bowl and gets 45˚c in summer and regular frosts. you grow different foods, some are good in frost but others a good in heat.
Check out Storyblocks and sign up for the Unlimited All Access Plan: www.storyblocks.com/caspian
Can you make a video discussing the effects of population decline in certain countries and regions. It's rarely talked about yet has huge implications for the priorities and challenges facing states
Thank you for not choosing a pyramid scheme for a sponsor this time.
I'm worried about China invading Australia. Solomon islands already militarized
I don't get the idea. They want to drill water from the sea? Or from some nearby rivers?
I welcome the new, less "flashy" transitions and appearance overall. This is very well done video!
As an Australian. I'm willing to bet everything that this will never happen.
Because it's been tested like 100 times and every single time it's been tested by anyone with a brain it's completely and utterly unfeasible. Also basic physics shows that it would never work either.
@@pupdaddie and what basic physics is that?
As an Australia.
Mate I agree with your point but like can you please fix that.
@@hellenic300 the First Law of Thermodynamics.
@@pupdaddie Could you elaborate more on the relation of 1st Law of Thermodynamic and engineering project that wants to reroute some water to inland Australia?
As an Aussie, we can't manage water flow already in the outback. Farmers growing cotton in the desert (a water hungry crop) draw too much water from the Murray already, to the point it stops flowing properly and massive fish die offs occur frequently. A plan to Irrigate the interior would be abused before the water ever reached there, much like what we currently have.
Just punish troublemakers
It's called legislation, why tf are they growing cotton
@@jamesgoldring1052 Because they are allowed to sadly. These parasite grow cash crops and take huge amounts of water out of the murry-darling, which they use to fund the australian national and liberal parties, to write legislation that legitimizes their water theft. I recommend watching FriendlyJordies video on it called "Blood Water: the war for Australia's water". He explains it a lot better than i ever could.
We can't manage it because the scheme was ran by corrupt members of the Nat party. Yeah the greens were flops the way they carried on, but they had a point on how bad it was.
@@habibi1195 Egypt doesn't have the proper government (even though they should theoretically) to put in the legislation, Australia definitely does
Everyone else: "we measure in hectares"
Caspian report: "we measure in Ukraines and Czech Republics"
as well as belgiums
@@kai9720 yup, I was gonna say that.
I am going to need to convert that to Rhode Islands and Texases
Americans will do anything to avoid the metric system
@@Primalthirst he is Azerbaijani 🇦🇿 not American lol but I think his viewer base is American
As an Aussie this is news to me , we are constantly in drought conditions and I don’t ever see this happening
Constantly in drought? Are you kidding, the dams on the East Coast are full.
Surely one of those genius africans we keep importing will solve the problem for us!
@@strat5764 The US doesn't have 80% of their land mass as non arable like Australia does.
@@strat5764 The yanks are running out of ground water. Australia had to cap a lot of bores in the artesian basin because it is not unlimited.
The whole East coast of Australia is flooded right now. The water will come from the monsoon tropical north, which has a wet season every year producing huge amounts of water, most of which runs into the oceans.
The real problem in Australia is the salt which rises from the water table beneath the ground when you remove deep rooted trees/water it too much. There are 1000 good ideas to water Australia, but you’ll get nowhere until you you fix the salt problem! I like to think about this from time to time and hope I can get funding for a few ideas when I finish study.
What species of tress are you talking? and do any of these trees have economic exploit potential.?
But that’s where electrolytes are, and electrolytes are what your body needs! (idiocracy reference)
@Handsome Monkey King - Trees are the solution to both the salt problem and the drought problem of the interior (and a few others too). We need to plant billions in Oz!
Have you ever read about the rainfall study done in the 1980s along the rabbit proof fence? One finding was that there was more rainfall on the eastern side of the fence where mulga was growing compared to the western side which was cleared and farmed. The upshot being that even stunted and sparse tree cover increases rainfall.
I thought sheeps are responsible for deserts.
@@nfuel99 desserts are mostly sugars and cream
Our current incumbent government here in Australia is not known for its intelligence
Amen, brother. 🤓🇦🇺
@@nicheva417 Not yet, but one doesn't have to be a genius to vote in the interest of their future.
@@HavNCDy The light is still on the hill, mate
We are currently at RCP 6.0
Australia will be a desert used for uranium farming to fuel other countries.
It would be interesting to see where the Greens would sit on this topic?
As a hydrologist, I always advise caution about terraforming. The amount of fresh water needed for such feats are gargantuan, beyond what can be visualized by common sense. I’m convinced that, no matter how much it seems to rain on the coast, it’s still far short of what’s needed to “green a desert”
If successful, the most likely outcome is irrigated agriculture, increasing food security and plus an economic boost for Australia. Job creation will be minimal, given you will want to maximize yields through mecanization. The cost however is less water available for the costal cities (increasing reliance on desalination), plus an almost certain collapse of coastal ecosystem (due to decrease of freshwater inflow), taking a toll on fisheries and tourism.
Wouldn't it also couse climate to change?
The people will be moved, and the land once used for agriculture (before wide-spread urbanisation), will be used for agriculture again, albeit to a limited capacity.
it's been calculated many times and would work, job creation is irrelevant as we have 4% national unemployment rate which gets closer to 0% as you move inland, it's not like many Australian want to work on a farm.
Anyway with greenies and environmentalists are in charge there is no way something like this would eventuate, and if they find one Aboriginal scratch whole project cancelled
@@ok-re1md yeeeeah, that 4% claim made by our current government is more than a little inaccurate and very easy to see the fudging once you dig about a garden trowel deeper than media put out by Fairfax/Murdoch/ABC...
NAh bruh. People forget what 🅱ig WATER does to mfkrs. Trust me on this, it'll be great. Amazon-2 !
Dear Australia. If you guys figure out how to get sufficient water in the interior without wrecking the environment, lets us know in US how it is done so we can do the same for the southwest. If we figure it out first, I promise we will share the info!
Oh don't worry, as an Aussie I can 100% guarantee we won't
Ask the israelis how they did it
When you alter the environment, you will definitely wreck it... you could only choose one...
The south west already did it with the Colorado river
@@Jack-russell103 Emptying the Jordan is not the answer.
As an Australian, I lived in Longreach, western Queensland for some time and it didn't matter what you tried to grow, the soil was so poor and low in nutrients you had to build up the soil in your garden through compost and mulch to get anything to grow and thrive. I think a lot of the area mentioned is very poor for growing things...adding lots of fertiliser is not the answer.
You could always get that compost from Barnaby Joyce!
Agree with you, Mike. Though I'm from the other side of Australia, W.A. Where north of Geraldton the land gets sparser and sparser until you reach the Pilbara which consists of rock, rock and more rock. In between the hills you get streams and rivers which dry out during Dry season. Along river banks there is good soil washed down during wet season, things grow there easily, but go further out like 1/2 kilometre and the soil disapears and the rock claims the ground again. Over centuries the top soil has been washed away and exposed the stone/rock/minerals underneath, nothing can be grown on the surface in large quantities. On my last visit up there, I did visit an Aboriginal settlement that was farming lucern, oats and hay stock feeds via a rotary inundation watering system, the water was derived from the iron ore open cut mining facilities which needed to dewater the depths to get at the rich iron ore, so the water supply was plentiful. But all this is only small scale.
@@itchyvet from wa too. Out past Yuna on the sides of the Greenough is amazing soil but no rain.
@@itchyvet Come on mate, the Pilbara isn't Just rocks - in between the rocks they have gravel!
Judging by the replies, i think farming isn't possible. But hey.!! You still got water and electricity. Right?
Me: let's watch something unrelated to Ukraine for a change
Shrivan: "An area 3 times the size of Ukraine"
I thought the EXACT same thing!
But then I thought about how smart it was for him to make that comparison. Everyone watching this channel likely has a good idea of the size of Ukraine by now, since we are all mostly geopolitical nerds. It’s an area fresh in our minds. Smart comparison, CR. But yeah, I definitely thought the same thing as you lol
haha 👌😂
Urgent attention needed! ✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
I think the comparison was due to Ukraine being known as the breadbasket of Europe, not just recent events.
I think it was well placed , if Ukraine can supply Europe then Australia could theoretically feed Asia ....
with or without Crimea and donbas?
Heres how smart the government is. They keep zoning our best agricultural land for residential developement.
That, or gas and coal.
Literally this.
Even if we had the political will to do a multi government project we still don't have the competent administrators to do that.
Australia produces enough food for 90 million people and is one of the most food secure places on Earth. This is not an issue.
Or "aboriginal" reservations/"sacred spiritual" sites, it seems
unless ya wanna build up, it will keep happening.
Or somehow force people just to live in arid towns, ignoring why people don't go there (climate and jobs)
You should look into "Keyline Design" developed by the Australian farmer P.A. Yeoman. The idea is to slow down the water flow from precipitation down a terrain, locally, by making it follow the contour lines. One way to do this cost- and space-efficiently is to have farm roads be placed on the lower side of the contour, effectively making the road's upper ditch act as the "dam"/river of incomming watee. The water then travels parallel to the contour, gradually departing from it to the next, lower contour. This can all be adapted to the specific context of the system in question, but has huge potential to locally maximize water-capture following the rare rain-periods.
Completely agree mate, keyline design using swales is a game changer for farming. Only problem is in regard to broad acre agriculture, not that it's unfeasible, but that it's different and requires a completely different mindset and operations model.
Yes, Yeoman tested and found useful.
The Chin dynasty in China had a similar problem in the form of the Min River which constantly delivered droughts and floods instead of massive amounts of food that it had the potential of bringing. The Chin built levies and irrigated a massive swathe of Eastern China which made it into what it is today, second only to South Asia in terms of population density in a massive agricultural region like Eastern China. It's strange to hear these days what with the dry, poor soil, but one day in the far future Eastern Australia will be as populous as Eastern China, at which time they will be one of the great poles along with the Eastern US, Eastern China, South Asia, Europe, Southern Brazil, East Africa and West Africa. They will all one day be as populous as one another as the knowledge of Aztec water gardens is translated and spread, they could easily grow corn that has very nearly as many calories per acre as rice or potatoes but it will get 8 harvests a year instead of one. One day, half of Australia will look like Mediterranean Europe.
Nope.
Anyone interested in land rehabilitation and water management should look at Peter Andrews work. His book “Back from the brink” is the most important introductory resource on land and water management in the Australian context.
He actually covers why keyline isn’t the best option in the book as his techniques are in some ways similar but very different.
First you must understand how the system developed to understand how all humans who have called this land home, have contributed to destroying it.
@@mrpinify Interesting. Could you elaborate more with specific practices, how they differ and why Andrews' solutions are better?
As an Australian all I can say is don't expect much. We are a country full of stupidity, we've been employing the same Agricultural techniques for decades possibly centuries and as a result we have turned huge swathes of once productive land into saline shit holes and deserts, overgrazing, mono-cultures you name it, we do it. Plenty of great farmers exist and have learnt to adapt to the variable and harsh climates and their success shouldn't be ignored, but plenty more are stuck doing the same thing their grandfather did. Every drought is worse then the last and water-management by the government becomes more and more corrupt.
If you want to see successful long term agricultural policy, I wouldn't look to my country.
I mean tbf most of it is desert so theres not a whole lot you can do
Oh yeah, goodbye Bathurst Platypus, and a local indigenous water rat: "water management". They're kaputski af.
"Every drought is worse *THAN" not then. You'll notice how the spellchecker doesn't pick the mistake up ... because "then" is not incorrectly spelt, but it _is_ the wrong word.
@@thebeanymac kaputski? Is that a word? af? Perhaps ms grammer should stfu 😂
I'm Australian and I reject Scott Moronson's plan to green the Outback. The Outback is dry and arid because Father Nature has decreed for the Outback to be dry and arid and we have no right to interfere in that decree, just as the Soviets had no right to dry up the beautiful Aral Sea. Father Nature always knows best.
@@Rishi123456789 Replace Father Nature with God and you'll see how ridiculous you sound
Plus the aussie government isnt the soviets
The Australian Government can't even manage to implement an internet infrastructure plan that was out dated before they even began and went insanely over budget and is still crap so I can only imagine what a mess they would make of a project as ambitious as this.
yep if its a plan made by the Australian government you shouldn't get ur hopes up
I myself am a geopolitical youtuber and Australian government has messed up on infrastructure projects before but this time it looks different and the recent commitment by the Australian government to Fastrack infrastructure projects seems practical.
@@AdityaRathoreproductionyou could possibly be correct i guess we will just have to wait and see how scotty plans it out and just hope he does not waste a few billion dollars while he's at it
That is why I only move to houses in Australia with FTTP. Don't wait for it to come to you, go to it. On 1giga FTTP now. Not as good as the fastest speeds in Europe, but still great. Upload speeds are still trash, but that's the norm in non-European countries.
@@shootinputin6332 yes well most servers are held in Europe and North America so of course any Australian service provider will be slow
"Why we don't build an inland sea in Australia?
Because of the Lizards..."
-the Internet historian
Someone has read Harry Turtledove’s World War books I see.
ua-cam.com/video/CwF8DYf5dDc/v-deo.html
From around 6:30 to 9:30
@@donkeysaurusrex7881 i haven't, i just know it from the Internet historian. Like everything else I have learned in life.
Urgent attention needed! ✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
Wouldn't the lizards feel the water and fuck off?
Here's a thought. If the cities in S/E Queensland treat an average of 1GL of sewage per day! only to dump it in the ocean, why not invest in a pipeline powered by renewable energy to push the treated water over the great dividing range and let it flow down river from there. 1,000,000,000L a day is a ton of fresh water to wave farewell to the ocean. It could recharge the rivers and give water to agriculture.
If you know anything about current Australian politicians, you know they don't give a crap about the green economy, or green anything.
Anything to improve this nation?
They would never!!! :P
@@TrebleSketch the only thing they like to improve on is politicians wallet size
@@brianyang5075 indeed, we basically hire them to do their jobs and it's time that we do make sure they are serving the people... Without going into conspiracy theories ofc xD
Urgent attention needed! ✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
western politicians only pay lip service to any of that
The Australian Government minister (Barnaby Joyce) that announced this project has a history of bungling up the water allocations for our major river systems. As a consequence, a review panel was set up to analyse all future government funded water projects.
However, this recently announced reworking of the inland diversion has had no feasibility or environmental impact studies. When the members of the review panel started contacting each other about this announcement (and their lack of opportunity to comment), Joyce's office staff sacked them all via email.
In other news, we're about to have an election down here. Hence the timing of the announcement.
South Australians - "We're goin to Bonnie Doon!.... We're goin to Bonnie Doon!"
It does not have to be this exact scheme, we should not throw the baby out with the bath water over politics.
That is such an Australian name! 😂
The real plum would be creating deep navigable rivers next to good farmland. The USA did this with the Mississippi River watershed.
You build industrial cities on this network near the raw resources (like Pittsburgh), and you have cheap industry with easy access to the world market.
Only don't make your main port like New Orleans. It's a perfect place for a port but a lousy place for a city. It's under the level of the river. Derp.
You may even want to build out into the ocean and get that super port much closer to the action.
@@protorhinocerator142 The territory is a bit to rugged for that kind of thing, but a happy compromise could be achieved with careful planning.
Caspianreport covering my country! Now I can truly say you're the UA-camr I want to be!
He even got a few parts right
Dope channel u dont need to aspire to be any youtuber other than yourself 💯
USA USA USA USA
He already covered us when talking about Timor Lest 😅
Koalas are the cutest things ever.
I’m Australian. I’m not sure where you are getting this but this is absolutely in no way happening at all. Water management is a big deal here, and it is certainly subject to heated discussions, but wide scale irrigation of massive outback areas is just not discussed.
I have lived in Cairns in Northern Queensland twice over the years and all ill say is during the wet season (Summer) the rain is unworldly! it's unreal how much it rains and all that water is mostly wasted. Massive storm drain pipes would help mitigate evaporation, it would be ridiculously expensive but worth it in the long run to terraform the Outback maybe/probably?
I would support a Royal Commision into the topic and accept there findings and if they give it the green light then why not do it.
@@HavNCDy For a project of this size you would probably need lawyers to look into it on all sorts of level's but I agree and I get your point.
We need to look at the prespective of Aboriginal Australians, Engineers, Farmers, Lawyers the lot. What I was trying to say is that it's worth the 2-3 million dollers of tax payers money to look into it.
Also, agriculture west of the dividing range has zero impact on the barier reef as any runoff ends up in the gulf of carpentaria or lake Eyre 👌
Mate, too much tax. In Vic they beer fuck tax, like a fuck bar cost 10 buck
@@davidgrowsdragonfruit5301 We get alot of water during the wet season mate and most of it is wasted. We need to be more efficient with our water managment in the future.
All the local jobs as well would be great for local economies. As Australians we are quite good at digging big holes...😂 We mine Iron Ore on massive scales. We could do it!
Salt coming up from the soil is a problem throughout the USA southwest and a solution to it doesn't appear likely. This project could result in a Continential disaster.
Exactly what I thought.
The clue is in one of the first sentences Shirvan said. "Since the 1930s..."
If there's been plans around for almost a century, it's science fiction and nothing else. CaspianReport has been better a few years back. It's become a clickbaity and sensationalized channel after it blew up..
@@schtreg9140 I some parts of western Kansas and central Texas and western Oklahoma ideas like this have worked well but these areas are semi-arid. In areas like New Mexico and Arizona the salt is slowly killing the vegetation despite the irrigation. The project appears too ambitious according to the Caspian Report and the locals in Australia. To green that much of the continent sounds like too ambitious to me. On the other hand, I am sure that Australia could do better than it is doing currently.
The US has been pumping water from wells that have a high saline content. Were talking about rainfall sent into the interior which should have an opposite effect.
Same in Western Australia
"No one can battle against the stream of history, they can only float on the surface and steer."
Can we appreciate this eloquence?
not eloquent, it's hackneyed
I agree it’s an amazing saying but I believe our friend Caspian said “paddle” instead of “battle” which makes more sense and makes it even better
No. Science can reduce History (and all who sail in her) to an embarrassing montage of madness. Of course we are better than that.
See Carl Sagan's _Pale Blue Dot_ speech. Now that is eloquence.
@@WindofChange2023 Well, first there's the - what is the genome offering?, argument. Wall to wall alphas last I looked. 'C-' is our highest mark so far.
Then there's the _distributed systems_ with an _invisible hand_ component in conjunction with 'individual autonomy' that historically produces the best results position. The Democracy plus Capitalism, and waiting for Science argument.
Then *Regenerative Agriculture's* 'restoring Eden' argument.
Then there's the demand that Atheism comes up with a completed 'meaning for life' proposal which is just a rehash of the above. Belief is thus reduced to Art in its many formats.
Of course it's fixable but will this Cosmic experiment ever be ready?
Till then your argument above is senseless. Was he a great Scientist? No. He was great communicator. Politics and the unequal distribution of power is the recurrent theme of history, it's ego, failure, messy and stupid mostly. Where on earth did pacifism enter the argument? If you mean Vietnam - what happened there? Afghanistan, the prequel?
You have to be cautious of people with big ideas. When a large public works becomes more important than the people it serves, it will usually do more harm than good. When history haters use the word "history", they often use it as a code phrase for "government force".
As an Aussie , this would be way to smart, beneficial and awesome for our government to comprehend ,let alone do!💯
This reminds me of the Salton Sea disaster and part of Eastern Arizona that was irrigated about 100 years ago until the irrigated land became too salty for farming. There are ways to irrigated deserts without making the land too salty, but it requires careful management with allowing some of the water to bring the salt with it as it makes it to the seas.
One of the main problems is that these rivers will never make it to the sea. They discharge into inland basins and slowly drain into the groundwater, guaranteeing a rise in salinity. When you see a lake on any map of Australia, chances are that it is rarely underwater.
Most of the time, most of the "lakes" in the outback of South Australia look like recent photos of the Salton Sea. As SocialDownclinber implied, they do occasionally get wet if there is a big influx of flood water but usually they are vast salt flats.
@@SocialDownclimber Incidentally, one of the "big greening ideas" that got bandied about when I was a kid (mid last century) was use nukes to blast a channel from Port Augusta northward to that potential inland sea because a fair area there is below sea level.
Of course that water would have become VERY salty when inflow from the Spencer Gulf brought in more salt as evaporation from the inland sea outpaced fresh water from rains in its catchment... ie: constantly.
Perhaps new inflows like proposed in this video could help against that happening but I doubt it. There is already an huge amount of salt lurking in the soil above the water table out there. I think enough water to green the inland would certainly be enough water to mobilise that ground salt.
If there is a salt layer in the ground deep below the surface, it stays there without seeping up to the surfact if ground in between is dry. If irrigation wets the ground down to this layer, the salt will slowly creep up to the surface and make it useless for farming. This has happened in some places in Australia, so before investing in a new irrigation scheme, check for deep salt layers first!
@@anderslvolljohansen1556 : _Orrr..._ dig a big hole, fill it with water, and raise inland sea food.
Let's maybe talk about the current 'food crisis' in Australia - i.e. most of the food produced is going into export, while the local population has to just 'tighten the belt' and loosen purse strings to afford the measly leftovers (and this is just the tip of the iceberg of monstrosities committed over the years). What is being done to the inhabitants of this magnificent land is appalling!
The politicians need to make laws where things should be locally sold before permitting exports
Nothing here is for our benefit unless it makes the mining companies and China happy as well
Found the Trumper lol
Your country’s entire history is founded on doing awful shit to the inhabitants of that great land. Why are you surprised? Sounds like y’all today are getting off pretty easy compared to the aborigines.
@@googleuser3163 American detected. Not everybody views the world through the "orange man bad" worldview. These issues have nothing to do with Trump or America.
Australia is a very interesting country, so massive, so advanced around the coast, yet so much remains untamed and barely habited, if at all.
A lot of it won,t support many people
It's basically uninhibited because most of the land area is uninhabitable. Vast majority of us live near the coast, i'm about 6km from the Pacific.
Rather than trying to alter nature work with it,the American plains have been turned into dustbowls by exploitive corporate agriculture .
The European settlers of Australia who don't consider themselves Asians should stop trying to dominate a larger group of people.
You will eventually be assimilated.
The interior is inhabited by many Aboriginals. They prefer living in the desert and not being part of the white Australia. And now they will be invaded again in the desert. How sad💔
Its another planet if you venture away from the coast
One thing to remember is that the region around Lake Eyre is extremely salty, it's an old sea bottom after all. I've always thought an easier way to restore the ancient sea would be a pipeline through South Australia. Lake Eyre is around 150 feet below sea level so a pipeline from 50 feet underwater in South Australia would simply drain sea water into the Lake. It would literally syphon the water. The inland sea would expand until evaporation matched the water coming in through the pipe. It's cheaper and if it's a mistake, easy to rectify. Put a hole in the pipeline and the syphoning stops and the sea would shrink back to current levels.
One problem ... It would salt up ...
@@jasonhockly8655 So? Use it for salt mining. I think the greater benefit would be the extra rain over the central region.
For that matter, if it gets salty enough like the Dead Sea it becomes a tourist attraction.
I'm a forestry engineer. From what I see, the point of this is to "restore" or better said "improve" the indland as much as possible, so constructing rivers from the north covers much more area, therefore greening much more land, which is the whole point and also creating the possibility of hydroelectricity production. The disadvantage would be that we as professionals in ecosystems managing can't really predict what will actually happen, even though we can predict the basic consequences with high certainty. Also, the current ecosystems would certainly change a lot, probably for the better taking in consideration our context but that'd be subjective if you ask conservationists as some species could disappear. Now, when it comes to the salt in the soils, it isn't really such a bad thing, considering there are many crops or plants that resist salty soil, but it would depend on agronomists and economists.
No the problem is, once you started, you can't stop it. Because the water is salty. When it would dry up again, this salt will get blown around by wind and ruin even more land by salting it up. And the lake itself would be so salty, not much use would be created. Bring in salt in the area is just a bad thing. If anything you would need desalinated water, maybe produced with solar power or something like that.
@@3komma141592653 Sorry mate, I wasn't clear. The idea isn't so much to use the inland sea (except maybe for salt mining), but to let it evaporate. The lake constantly gets refreshed through the pipeline and the evaporated water falls elsewhere. It's to increase rainfall across the dry centre.
And putting more salt there won't make any difference, it's already a completely dry salt flat. Except in flood times. Like I said it's a dry sea bottom.
As an Australian I have known about this idea since I was a child and have known its infeasible almost as long. It would be about as successful as the plan to dam the Mediterranean, what could ever go wrong.
There's nothing in the plan that hasn't been done before. From a technical perspective it's not at all difficult. The question is economic.
@@somethinglikethat2176 there’s nothing in ‘the plan’ under consideration lol
It’s a debunked 80+ year old plan, not under consideration by any level of government. The most recent ‘regreening the outback’ plan was launched a billionaire back in the 80s and proposed digging a trench from Port Augusta in SA to lake eyre to feed seawater to the lake to increase precipitation. But that much cheaper and quicker idea was also completely shut down
Look, all I'm saying is that we could walk to the Roman shipwrecks once it all dries up, and that alone is worth the trouble.
I'm Australian too and I've always loved the idea of this plan. We're sitting on a piece of land bigger than continental Europe yet most of it is totally uninhabitable and unarable.
It wasn't always like this, just a few million years ago australia had much greater forest coverage, now the sand that replaced it is still surprisingly nutrient rich. Even just 100,000 years ago right before humans arrived much more of Australia was covered in the rainforests that now only exist in tiny pocket's in northern queensland.
Australia has a COMPLETELY different ecology to what it had only 100,000 years ago, very recently in ecological time, and a lot of that is due to our influence. Maybe if we could realise the plan to saturate the desert we could revive a bit of the past.
@@ospritely8144 That rain forest you mention relied on different weather patterns, for example 3000 years ago Egypt had a lot of savannah either side of the Nile, today not so much, so even if we watered the desert it wouldn't be permanent.
My brother and I had this discussion not long ago. My idea was more around utilizing large pipes to transport the excess flood waters, avoiding the evaporation issue. Basically using regular solar powered pumping stations and reservoirs along the way as needed. The issue always seemed to come down to the economics and especially the huge initial investment for such a project. The question would always lead- Would fellow Aussies be willing to pay for a nation building project that very likely their own generation wouldn't see the returns from but every generation thereafter would? Basically, it's the same question of every nation building project, past, present and future.
“A society grows great when men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” - Greek Proverb
Will never work . Do you know anything about sceice. I'm veyr intellegent , and I know your plan will never work. let us very smrat people do the thikning.
@@cpowell4227 mind sharing with us your smart reasons why it won't work?
Good idea. We can't get to the end state in one go. We will have to implements lots of mini solutions along the way. This will slowly expand habitability. There will however be lessons to be learned along the way.
@@monkeydluffy3769 it seems obvious: water volume is far too small, rainfall location is unpredictable, distances are too vast. The scales are all obviously wrong.
If you're interested in other factors related to water management in Australia, look into the flood plain harvesting in the Murray Darling basin.
Rainwater harvesting earthworks do a lot.
There was a good documentary on this by an aussie journalist, look up "floodplain harvesting Jordan shanks"
Brad Lancaster has come up with decentralized ways to harvest rainwater. Some many Aussies are already familiar with but I believe he came up with some great ideas.
China has centralized it at the expense of decentralized solutions and made a huge mess of it...
Wasn't it the murray that the retarded gov gave a massive amount of water to a bunch of foreign folk for their dumb farm which ended up destroying a large amount of land, animals plus causing a town to die off.
"The government has a plan, it's practically guaranteed to work" - Noone ever.
"Massive-scale government plans have never worked" - people who know nothing about history.
“The government” used to be able to do big projects. But they have a hard time now with the naysayers and trolls complaining to get things done.
We'd be dealing with a climate that includes air temperatures above 45C and soil temps above 60C and humidities so low the dew point is negative. Not much will survive that beyond the existing indigenous vegetation.
Yes I am a geopolitical youtuber and every week I come across articles talking about Australian climate change. Australia is one of the top countries that will get affected by climate change the most.
Grow irrigated winter crops, spray irrigation, common place in Saudi Arabia, and parts of Africa. Livestock still run there now, QLD is more habitable than people think.
Humidity is very high in the northern half of the country
Urgent attention needed! ✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
@@djcoopes7569 Yes, it is dependant on the intrusion of the monsoon during wet season but this tends to be limited to the savannah ranges.
I think this is totally possible. I am from Texas and we've pretty much turned our dry plains and deserts to fertile farmland by making countless small reservoirs. I wonder what one big one could do!
By stealing all the water out of the Rio Grande from New Mexico. We have practically 0 rights to our own water because of stupid policy makers
Stop messing with the terrain.
@@hughjass4736 Not me doing it man. Replying to a youtube comment won't do anything and I do not see a problem.
@@hughjass4736 The terrain never should've threatened us by being inhospitable to life. We're defending ourselves.
@@boxBlakedon't care, the sooner these bills pass the sooner I reckon your people are restricted to the city, stay away from wrangler's land.
It's not empty desert, it's an ecosystem that has evolved over millennia and destroying it so Australia can export food to an overpopulated world is yet another idiotic idea.
Sorry Caspian Report, but as a New Zealander, we are right next to Australia, and literally nobody is saying they should do this. This concept is wildly off base from any sort of serious infrastructure discussions. Let me know if you do a video on high speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne
There are members of the National Party and independents from North Queensland demanding it. They periodically demand it be looked into in return for voting on other legislation.
As a South Australian, we sure as hell don’t want this destroying our fragile native environment of Lake Eyre!
Yeah I haven't heard about the Bradfield plan in years. It's more of an old thought experiment than something that's actually going to happen. There's plenty of interesting stuff being talked about here and more to the point far more interesting stuff that's NOT being done. Australia's geography and infrastructure has so much potential, but it's all a huge mess.
Now that I think about it I'm shocked Caspian Report didn't talk about the countries absolutely pathetic, 50 years out of date rail. Or how failing to invest in renewables has cost the economy about 12 trillion$ so far and about another trillion each year. Or how my governments foreign policy has done nothing but piss off and antagonise our neighbours, trading partners and allies for ten years. Sorry about that by the way. We're such cunts to you.
@Burble, political parties quite often adopt unworkable infrastructure projects as election policies and then drop them when feasibility is conducted. As I said, this is not serious infrastructure discussion, its the sort of talk that your dad likes to talk about at the breakfast table in hopes of australia being a future superpower. Its wank plain and simple. Might as well be the same as NZ reclaiming the underwater continent of Zealandia.
@@WhatIsSanity interested where you get your numbers of a trillion dollars per year. You need to stop making things up. It makes you look very stupid.
I can’t see how this could ever possibly backfire in our faces
Oh no hahahaha
The weird eco pessimists again
Pessimism is an unattractive quality
@@michaela2634 People playing god without knowing what they're doing never backfires. I just hope we get real experts to do it and politician interference is minimal
@@gothicfan52 Do you even believe in God?
"It came down to the experts to spoil the fun"
Sigh, look, I'm Australian and a scientist (earth science / geology so, relevant). Whilst Bradfield was a great civil engineer, perfect for bridges and railways, his scientific and environmental understanding was lacking (case in point was the evaporation calculation). The Bradfield Scheme is, and always was, a silly fantasy. Advancements in climate controlled vertical farming is both environmentally and economically superior.
Doubt. Vertical farming seems expensive and ineffective. Maybe useful on other planets or a closed city.
@@apersonlikeanyother6895 well this sceme will also be a waste of time.
100%
This idea is a fantasy and it's actually something constantly sprouted by alt right chuds in this country. It's disappointing to see it getting any sort of mainstream traction.
Climate controlled farming will always be more expensive than outdoor farming, even if you automated the process. One idea I've read is to build the farms underground where the temperature is constant, but tunneling a bunch of holes still represent a large initial investment. I don't think vertical farming will be feasible without gov subsidies.
Farming does not have to be purely extractive or environmentally damaging. Expanding farm land with an understanding of soil health and nutrient cycling can also expand ecological benefits to the entire region. Keeping farms as part of nature is much more beneficial than warehouses full of crops and not used for anything else.
This seemed a well researched piece. I grew up in Australia in the 60's as the Snowy sheme came to fruition and as the decades passed there appeared significant environmental damage as a result of changes in the direction of water flow and intensification of agriculture along the Murray River. I went to UNE where there was an Ag Science department and I recall students discussing many of the issues covered in the report. Time and again, the mention of the poor nutrient content of the soil was mentioned.
History also records that widespread pastoral activity took place across the state of NSW beyond the Darling River in the late 19th/early 20th century. The grazing livestock degraded the land to such an extent that grazing activities ceased and the land became marginal at best.
The Australian environment is fragile and European settlement has brought largescale changes and damage to it. If nothing else, the good intentions of past schemes has been a demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Fires
Not to forget that I read in this biography book of Australia, concerning both Aboriginal and European settlement, that the Outback of NSW, from Cobar all the way to the Darling River and beyond did have this *top soil* layer that was fertile, pretty much like the Great Plains of the USA.
However, whereas the top soil of the Great Plains was over 3 meters (10ft) thick, in Western NSW it was about 40cm (+1ft). Yet, like the Dust Bowl that occurred on the Great Plains in part of overgrazing by cattle and removing lots of native vegetation, the same thing happened in Western NSW.
Only in the latter case, the fertile top soil ended up being totally lost, due to the fact that it was already not that thick. On top of clearing the native vegetation, like Saltbush, that kept the *salinity* levels low and the land arable and livable by all sorts of flora & fauna, the levels went up after the landclearing and made the land unuseable. Both for animals, including cattle and farming crops.
Right now researching have begun planting large swathes of Kangaroo Grass, in an effort to make these areas productive and livable again. Due to the hardy nature of this plant species and that it could lower the salinity levels to such an extent that other plants might grow again and will attract animals too.
@@victorsamsung2921 yeah id agree you are probably right. Huge areas of the country were also impenetrable forests, these areas are now where the large cities are. Its mind boggling just how much land was cleared, much of it needlessly or excessively.
@@manchagojohnsonmanchago6367 Amen! Take the State of Victoria as an example. Almost, if not 93% exact, of the total land area was covered with forests at the time of European settlement in the early 1800s. You know, forests like those you find at the Black Spur Range, Mt. Dandenong, Yarra Valley, Great Ocean Road etc. That is more than 210.000 km2 of Victoria's total 238.000km2. Most of it has been cleared or lost since. Everywhere you go you can see it. Along the Murray River, the Western Victorian Volcanic Province and Philip Island etc.
As an Australian, I can almost guarantee you we would never try anything so bold.
As a Canadian, I agree. We wouldn't try either.
I hope one day you will...
Yeah, it's not like we haven't built the longest water supply pipeline in the world at 560km from Perth to Kalgoorlie already...
But stay dumb about your own country, kids.
Boys, with this water we can operate four times as many breweries. If we complete this project we may never have to be sober again. This is Australia's Moonshot, nay, their destiny.
@@pupdaddie Agree but this one would be uneconomic, small amounts of water passing huge amouints of more fertile land in Queensland, better used there. The rest is speculative padding. Because a project is feasible from an engineering pov, can be hopelessly uneconomic. Not so with the WA pepelins, for domestic and small industrial use in highly lucrative, concentrated gold mines.
I have severe doubts about the Bradfield Scheme. Soil salinity is already a huge problem in this country, and I doubt that this huge and expensive project can avoid that same pitfall.
What do you think of drip irrigation, which probably wouldn't overwater the soil?
@@collinwhites9833 I support drip irrigation, I have seen its success myself.
The eastern states of Australia apart from some of QLD don’t have salinity problems.
Paddling against stream of history.... when is book with Shirvan's quotation coming?
I'm an Australian & its not one of our genuine projects. For a start our experience in the Murray Darling is a catastrophic example of river & environmental damage from flood irrigation etc. But more importantly our deserts are unique environments that are to be preserved as much as possible. Unfortunately another problem is, regardless of all the billions of tons of flood waters that come from the northern river systems, all the water is very salty by the time it reaches the middle of Australia. The areas are so vast & so dry that it would be difficult to pull off such a project.
There was several attempts to create inner sea in the African Sahara desert in Egypt by connecting the Mediterranean sea with the Qattara depression in the middle of the western desert. I think Caspian Report should cover this issue in a separate video :)
What about the Fayoum basin in Egypt? Similar idea I’d say
@@Zoanodar I think my ancestors , the Pharaohs, had managed to construct a very well established irrigation system to connect the Nile basin with the Fayoum basin.
Didn’t it need like 500 nukes to work. And Israel also had a similar idea
@@zizogadolio It's amusing how the Ancient Egyptians and Romans etc. Understood the importance of innovating their water-based infrastructure and yet many advanced countries today (the US in particular) can't even be bothered to maintain what they've already got.
@@mrgaudy1954 They had the forsight and immovable culture and ideaology that spanned thousands of years and we can't plan for next month.
Think about this, two structures can be standing side by side identical in everyway and every detail and be dated to over 1000 years apart.
We can only dream of having that kind of assurance in our existence now.
There was a similar idea in Western Australia to use large canals to funnel water from the Ord river project down to Perth... again, it was considered ridiculous due to the evaporation rates. in fact, the rate of evaporation would have meant not a single drop would have made it.
old enough to remember the article in the Sunday Times about the man-made mountain range down the border between the east west to re green the outback? Hollow mountains filled with water, and the updraft of air currents there would naturally create rain clouds, (cite watching air currents rise up the face of the great pyramid at Giza). cost prohibitive to the Nth degree, but yeah, not the first time they had such grand idea's
I want someone to make a new kind of forest. An agricultural forest, instead of using non-native mono-crops, we could use native fruits, vegetables and other vegetation in the right combination to improve soil fertility. Once pests enter such as kangaroos, buffalo, and deer we could then hunt the animals for more food. We also don't have to deforest and existing area we could start using compost and manure on a less fertil area of land. The water problems could be solved by using flood water and to stop evaporation we could cover the canals/ basin's with solar panels. Plz leave your thoughts.
Solar panels over canals might be a good answer.
@Matteo Tironi how so
@@youtubeoqlk5488 it's all about yields. And what you described doesn't have that high a yield, so it's not done (unless you're maintaining a forest for other reasons).
Very good and well researched video.
As an Australian I'll touch the one part of the topic you don't because of a (fair) desire not to make your videos too political: effectively all the water infrastructure terraforming plans that have come up in Australia in the last two decades are climate change denialist attempts to divert attention from the need to reduce emissions. There is a very small but very powerful minority of big agriculture interests (particularly cotton) pushing these changes despite no wide spread support in Australia. The increasing undermining of the National party primary vote by independents and SFF is a reflection of this reality.
Water management is a completely toxic topic in Australia because the current government refuses to touch any policy that reduces (or even cuts growth of) water use due to their big agriculture donors. The opposition refuses to touch it because any attempts to pass such policy will be framed in the media as anti-farmers (despite local communities generally supporting reform) due to media ownership concentration and it's not a key topic to die over.
Welcome to the 'lucky country' folks. Too bad we're driving all our luck in to the ground and digging any value out of the ground and exporting for multinational profits. Why didn't we nationalise the resources industry like Norway or Saudi Arabia again?
Utter Commie Crap! Your argument is lost with your ideology! If you want a piece of the mining wealth, buy some shares in Rio Tinto, Fortescue, BHP (biggest mining company in the world), Newcrest for gold, Santos for gas, Ozminerals for copper; all Australian companies. Nationalisation would be the end of these businesses by implementation of non-commercial management. You're denying the success of the Snowy Hydro scheme, which has created the food bowl in the Murray Darling basin, mainly for horticulture & rice, and producing numerous attractive liveable regions in the process, while still allowing environmental flows to sustain the original rivers.
Because we are a british colony the queen owns our mines
I've been living in Cairns for 2 years and I think this would be a great idea. Especially when you think that 12 meters of rain falls in Tully and in a good year.
The reason the vast majority of Australia is dry is because of the great dividing range causing a huge rain shadow.
All we'd have to do is create a water course from Tully towards the interior.
I don't think it has to involve dams.
Mosquitos are already pretty bad around Cairns... I, for one, agree that we should make all of Queensland a mosquito and midge larva paradise, not just the coastal regions.
Tully is like 20 metres above sea level, I guess there is hundreds of kilometres of land 100 metres above sea level on that path, pushing shit uphill I do believe
Need a man made mountain, so high it creates it's own weather system and rivers
You'd need a mountain *range* , which ain't happening unless some giant space monster lays a mountain range sized bog that extends from Broome to Whyalla.
A work for the dole scheme!
It needs to be very light tho ... So the continent doesn't capsize.
@@Banana_Split_Cream_Buns there are mountain ranges in australia, but they're all close ish to the coast,
flinders ranges used to be taller than mount everest but never had it's own eco system.
@@Banana_Split_Cream_Buns top tier comment
Those rivers are not permanent flows, the "dams" would just end up having all the water evaporate
Well the Bradfield plan was to take water from the Tully which is a permanent river. Up along the Qld coast there is enormous rainfall and the tiny little rivers that flow from the mountains east tend to have magnitudes more water in them than the great outback rivers. The idea was that the permanent, massive flows of the Tully could be dammed, tunneled and diverted west rather than letting them flow east and turn the inland rivers into permanent rivers. But still, as covered by Shirvan, evaporation is a huge issue and generally these rivers only flow when they are in flood (and the deluge is enough to overcome the evaporation rates, such that the water can reach Lake Eyre)
Let's go Australia, We are brothers. Grertings from New Zealand🇳🇿💘🇦🇺
Once were warrior, bru
Lots of work for our Kiwi brother's 💰
we have got a whole lot of useless land here in australia, good for nothing but mining !!!
but i live in the green east and am so happy my parents brought me here as a small child, it's a great place to live, life is easy and happy here !!!
Lake Eyre, is pronounced “Air” not “Airy”
Jane Eyre.
Its called Lake not is effn aint.
@@glenwarrengeology did you have a stroke?
Urgent attention needed! ✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
No, it definitely is "Airy".
I love all of your content, but I will say that it was nice to see a video that isn’t about Russia or Ukraine. :)
Keep up the great work, CR.
Yes! I am a geopolitical UA-camr myself and I agree this video was very well researched
Urgent attention needed! ✌👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 💖✌
"geopolitical concerns eventually drove Canberra..."
*shows footage of Sydney*
Love how they decided to build a capital at Canberra as a middle ground and distinguish the city as its own representation of the country, and people STILL think the capital is Sydney or Melbourne.
you shouldn't know this your kim jong un
as an australian, id much rather have water piped to outback communities rather than alter the enviroment with large scale terraforming projects. We already have cattle out that way so piping it would be enough to support them.
Cattle cant drink sea water tho
@@b.hagedorn2565 are u daft? who said anything about sea water?
@@b.hagedorn2565 genetically modify said beta cattle into alpha saltwater drinking cattle
"To another dam on the Herbert" The US has the Hoover Dam, and now Australia has the Herbert Dam....
Herbert Hoover: *Perfectly balanced, as all things should be*
I mean Gaddafi managed to create an ambitious system of pipes that supplied fresh water across Libya from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer so if that was possible, then this idea isn't too far fetched
Gadhafi was a humanitarian where in the west we are ruled by cooperate greed
Now that's interesting, I had never heard of that. Gadaffi huh? Looks like I'll have do more research on the guy.
@@kmmediafactory yep
Same with Xí Jìnpíng and his poverty alleviation campaign
Could you do a report on the once-great Murray-Darling system? In earlier times, Paddle steamers regularly plied the Darling river, via the Murray, carrying supplies from Adelaide up into southern Queensland and carrying wool and grain back to Adelaide for export. At some point it was decided that cotton and rice were excellent arid land crops, hence only a trickle remains in the river, with parts of the Darling reduced to a series of puddles in summer. It has been said that Cubby station's massive dam holds 9 times the volume of Sydney harbour. There are still a lot of rusted lifting bridges from before the time water became "managed", still being used as roads in the permanent down position. There's a new bridge at Wilcannia, but the old lifter still stands next to it. A quick look in G. Maps street view gives some idea of how grand the river once was. Meanwhile further south on the Murray, entire forests of River Red Gums, which evolved to thrive on annual flooding, have died from dehydration, and the Koorong National park at the Murray river mouth is little more than damp dunes.
I have not much trust in the goverment
roasted and called-out all the time by the UA-camr Juiceymedia.
"Once great"? It used to dry up. There are photos taken at Swan Hill where they were holding races on the river bed.
Having said that, you're totally correct about farming rice and cotton in a desert.
@@JohnJ469 which year was that severe drought? Drying up was a rare occurence before "management", now the Darling river is a permanent trickle, if that.
@@JohnJ469 Obviously you haven't been following the news.
@@blake9358 More than most people mate.
As a desert resident, I was waiting for the temperature to factor in. Anyone who lives in a desert or otherwise arid land know that water is precious and elusive when it wants to be. The original plan would solve one issue but it doesnt really solve itself.
But yeah I would love to see any terraforming effort in my lifetime. Hopefully something is worked out and approved of by all potential stakeholders and not just those with political power
I live in Australia, never heard of this.
The youtuber probably just glanced at Wikipedia every now and then for vaguely suggestive factoids.
The problem here is actually salt which is why the water into the central australia is so desperately needed to maintain and stabilize the current ecology. Australia is constantly salting from sea breeze and this is where the current desertification is coming from. The centre needs water in the aquifers, and growth in saltbush to stabilise the current situation as the ancient protective layer has been wiped out by sand erosion and cloven foot animals. Farmers can only do so much but there is a lot of Australia outside of the rain shadow regions.
The vast majority of Australias' water transfer system is below sea level and this is why the water movement is actually possible in each of the three water movement plans. Oh and the run off into the sea around the great barrier reef after the bradfield plan would be far less, as the issue there is exposed iron sand soil run off, the bradfield plan would actually divert the heavy floods away from the coast limiting the run off.
"The vast majority of Australia is below sea level..."
What?! According to Geoscience Australia 0.11% of land area (or 8500km2) is below sea level. Not what I'd call vast majority.
Desertification in a large part comes from the size of the continent, latitude and even ocean currents but not much to do with salt form sea breeze. There is a belt of desert regions on both the Southern and Northern Hemisphere. A large part of Australia just happens to fall into the southern one.
???
@@sandman0123 sandor you are right. I apologise. I meant that the water transfer region is below sea level. This area is the cave, salt layer, sandstone, and porus regional geology which is where the vast majority of water actually flows in regional areas. The internal salt flats which alone are more than 1% of the landmass are at depths well below sea level. Lake eyre is listed as sealevel in that report but is normally below sealevel when dry for example.
You were right for correcting me and again I apologise.
Edit: i have corrected the original comment.
There are a lot of sea shells in land. Found areas where they are absolutely everywhere that I thought I was on some kind of ancient scattered mitten.
@@sandman0123 i forgot to fully explain the saltificaton problem in Australia. Sorry this is 102 Australian geology and I forget others don't know it.
Australian geology is very different and incredibly old. This place is ridiculously tectonically stable and has been moving to be a desert actually measured in geological scales. The desertification you see in other nations really isn't caused the same way here as anywhere else.
Australia is huge, and well flat to put no fine a point of it. This means the water in the air just doesn't normally discharge into the superheated heart as there aren't enough hills and mountains to allow the water to fall in huge amounts. No alpines here until you hit the east coast. Because the salt can ride the winds as sea spray, it will fall first in rain and dew vapour across the nation and through the joy of chemical physics means that Australia is always gaining more salt from sea spray on its surface than is ever washed out.
It has left Australia with a crust of salt across the nation, and several super saturated salt aquifers in south australia, beneath the ones we generally recognise. Coastal regions are less likely to be salt affected than regional areas because at least they can expell the salt with the rain back to the sea.
If the aquifers in the regional areas sink the salt crust becomes a major problem as plants try to reach the water but hit the barrier and simply die. If there is enough water in the system the salt moves with the water flow to a deeper point instead. Too much water discharged too quickly instead pulls the salt to the surface leaving salt patches that only saltbush can rectify.
This regional salt isn't generally ever going away, but it can get captured in lower soil layers, or move to salt caverns or salt flats in the limestone. If we get lucky it hits the Murray Darling river system or other regional river systems and with time and flood rain even moves out to sea.
Saltificaton is such a problem that most of our local plants have gained salt tolerance, and our farmers use special farming practices for dryland farming including salt resistant crops just to handle the problem.
Salt is always a problem underlying the nations ecology so any disruption, say climate change, is magnified because of the ecologies fragility.
That is why more water matters. The regular water allows for a barrier against environmental disruption and while it would increase the rain shadow region it would stabilize the salt issue first. Lots of regular water into the system allows for the salt layers movement to a lower point not a sudden eruption to the surface as we see in the wake of flood events. Enough water in the Murray Darling and the underlying salt issue in that area becomes moot.
Hope that helps.
@@roseknightmare
Unbelievably informative, thank you
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Of course, the objective doesn't have to be industrial agriculture. We could make the place more pleasant and habitable, while using far less water on aquaponic agricultural methods instead.
Turning the area into a wetland has far greater potential benefits than trying to industrial farm a former arid land.
But of course, that would be thinking ahead, which is asking alot of the government that killed the great barrier reef and opened up the south sea to oil drilling.
- *"We could make the place more pleasant and habitable"*
For us. The plants, animals and insects that live there as it is now (and have done for tens of thousands of years, if not longer) will be either forced out or die just so we can have more places to comfortably make a mess. Human industry and pollution arnt the only things that can destroy ecosystems. Messing around with nature in _any_ way can seriously mess things up. I wonder when people, including environmentalists, will finally learn that lesson?
How would you make back the money spent on the project if you don't use it for agriculture?
@@SvendleBerries This project would at least partially counterbalance some of the negative impacts of human activities. Poor water management in arid areas is the biggest of today's world. Bringing more water inlands would replenish some of the water that humans used and wasted.
Of course projects need to carefully consider all possible, particularly salinization and accumulation of agrochemicals and other pollutants.
@@SvendleBerries Just like we humans had a positive impact on biodiversity with our slash and burn agriculture for ten thousand years, this project will do the same.
This is what a beaver does, but on a massive scale. And that is wonderful for biodiversity.
Yes, some die, but many more get the chance to live. We are thus then doing the opposite of our usual mass extinction.
Australia doesn't worry about geopolitics as the narrator claims. Also, the part of the desert described that would be made arable used to be an ancient ocean. There is so much salt there that it would take at least a hundred years to manage it to low enough levels to support plant life.
I think it’s better to build a fast rail system to connect towns and be able to move people and goods across states quickly. Then probably setup agricultural land beside these transport routes as a start.
All of Australia's arable land is already in use. Extending railway lines and increasing the size of inland towns must result in less agricultural production, and the loss of wildlife habitat.
Australia is the perfect place for rail. Everything is exactly the right distance apart to make all types of rail travel ideal. Shame passenger travel was gutted and replaced with the most wasteful forms of transport possible: personal automobiles and planes
@@TAP7a Personal vehicles are fine especially in regional Australia. No sane person wants to live in a world of centrally planned communal transport where you can't even do something as simple as a road trip with the family.
@@MrSmith-ve6yo lol, why would you do a road trip. Driving for hours in a heat, packed up with so many people? No thank you. I will keep myself to fast train travel for my family holiday destinations. You can even stop through multiple stations to visit places for some nice family tourism, there is no reason to waste resources and life on cars.
@@mjm3091 Never heard of the saying, "It's the journey, not the destination", I see. Not to mention that 99.999% of places will never be a near a trainline, such is the nature of a narrow rail corridor cutting across a broad land area. And nobody's forcing you in particular to take a road trip anyway so it's discomforts need not be yours.
Besides, you've exceeded your carbon credit limit for this month so you won't be allowed to use the high speed rail until the following month.
the most efficient use of the outback, like the sahara, is lots and lots of solar farms
even that's inefficient
@@shrooman768 each year that passes panels get cheaper and cheaper and more and more efficient. in a few years it will be worthwhile
@@Glaudge I'd imagine rooftop solar makes more sense.
In India they have solar panels over their cannels to reduce evaporation
@@mike-hunt3527 i just read that in a comment somewhere before i commented the first time not sure where i read it tho
"Can Australia's outback be turned into an oasis l, or is it just a mirage?"
Oh my goodness, how do you come up with these stellar lines for EVERY video? They really stick with me even after the video and just overall makes the video more enjoyable and memorable. Keep it up! 👍
most of these quotes aren't original tho
@@eifelitorn still it's rare to hear such well put metephorical quotes
I always wondered if there were people who enjoy that kind of geeky wordplay. Apparently there's one! I am certainly not one of them.
Unexpected consequences.
Large engineering programs don't always go according to plan.
Maybe it would be an idea to do some less intensive agriculture? Making permaculture a large scale national policies would help a lot with Australia's problems.
Yeah, decentralise food production. Do away with the insanity of transporting food in trucks halfway across the country. Every town should have a massive permaculture farm, which would provide jobs for the unemployed, and healthy fresh food. Then households could start there own small projects instead of maintaining useless lawns and gardens. Of course the last thing the government wants is for people to be self sufficient with food.
@@rexnemorensis8154 The government doesn't determine who gets what food, it's just that existing permaculture systems are either inefficient or not very profitable. I think the idea of permaculture and more "decentralized" food production is great in many ways, but consider the consequences of implementing it on a large scale. Three immediate problems stick out to me: With the current state of permaculture, we simply wouldn't be able to feed everyone due to the decreased efficiency; urban areas would rapidly depopulate, as urban living would be unviable without large scale, industrial food production; consumers would have their choice in produce heavily restricted by region and season (perhaps that's not a big deal to you, but I can think of some people I know that would be pissed that they can't eat their precious avocado toast in the middle of a New England winter).
I'm Australian and I reject Scott Moronson's plan to green the Outback. The Outback is dry and arid because Father Nature has decreed for the Outback to be dry and arid and we have no right to interfere in that decree, just as the Soviets had no right to dry up the beautiful Aral Sea. Father Nature always knows best.
@@Rishi123456789 Father Nature didn't plant a single one of the plants required to feed you, so unless you think that your very existence is an affront to nature itself that's a bit too simplistic of a worldview.
@@AngryF4ce Yes. A total transition over to permaculture would be ridiculous, but I think integrated it for towns would be ideal. Obviously cities would still require industrial agriculture, but problems like the vulnerability of supply chains, as demonstrated by the lockdowns, could be alleviated by maybe like a 30% self reliance in towns by growing fresh produce, and would allow a diversity in crop genetics (heirloom species etc.) Also there's a projected rise in elderly populations which usually move out of cities to coastal towns, which could provide a volunteer workforce and keep them healthy along with unemployed youth (decreasing crime and mental health problems etc.). Governments are moving in the wrong direction though, with plans for mega 'smart cities' and plans to restrict people from nature, creating an inherently more unstable system. Self sufficiency and independence is seem as a threat, people aren't allowed to keep chickens or grow medicines and most lawn herbicides target natural plant medicines like dandelions. Ultimately towns and suburban areas could be redesigned into an integrated sustainable, village style communities, and even create biodiesel, textiles, etc. Cities and rural areas could still follow an industrial model.
I think the wording 'restoring the inland sea' gives this more justification than it deserves. It makes it sound like the native fauna and indigenous population and obstacles for something that should inevitably be (even though the sea existed in the Cretaceous period).
I live in the outback of Queensland on the thomson river and around every 11 years the area turns into a green paradise from la nina rain falls like it is at the moment its a natural cycle the biggest benefit of this would to replenish the great artisan basins underground water supplies in turn raising the water table and restoring moisture to the outback which would increase rainfall to a harsh semi arid environment that a hundred years ago had a much higher water table and a much higher annual rainfall also the great artisan basin is the largest fresh water reserve on earth that needs to be protected from worse things ie hydraulic fracture gas extraction that cannot ever be aloud to devastate this precious resource for future of the Australian containent in conclusion if managed properly this could do the natural cycle wonders but humanity is greediness would be the scheme's downfall foreign ownership of Australia is already devastating this beautiful land google cubby station that was sold to the Chinese a cotton farm that is bigger than some European countrys it's sickening
When was the Last time Your Place saw Greenery?(Just Curious)
But I think even if everything goes right you guys would still face problem your Country is filled with Most Dangerous animals Imaginable after Amazon and if it becomes a Rain forest type from Desert not only it will harm the animal live they're and some of whom might extinct..
But the biggest challenge will be how would you counter Dangerous animals from your Neighborhood? I mean Literally if Australia Sift any they're population they're more and more Tropical predators like alligator , Deadly Spiders and Snakes would also move they're?
No One would want to live middle of Danger for life .... first two or three years may seem Golden but if you don't take Steps about Animals then it would a Game over match for Humans they're and also for some native Species like we get hard time to deal with Changing Climate those Animals will also found it hard and some of the rare who are already struggling for Humans and they're wierd Animal Invasion would just die and go Extinct..
And because Tropical area is just north Alligator Spider and snakes would love to move they're it's like a Gold Rush for them
We are having our third la Nina in a row this has been a missed opportunity.
Holy run-on sentence Batman!
Punc.tu.a.tion
The Australian government can’t even build enough houses for everyone let alone do all this.
Get some Asians in, cheap labour in exchange for permanent residency. They've been doing it for the last 50 years
It’s kind of uncanny how I just watched a video about China’s similar plan and the problems with it, impracticality, cost and destroying a healthy ecosystem that does exist in the desert.
As an Aussie I love hearing him say Australian towns and names
The pronunciation of Lake Eyre was funny
@@Michael_Chater I'm from the Uk and even I know it's pronounced Lake Air -"Lake AyRee" was like nails on a chalkboard. Props to this guy for making this video anyway, It's not like we're researching and producing content like this.
Great to see Hepparton got a mention.
I remember reading a story about Australia greening their interior but when they did it salt bubbled up and made growing anything impossible even native plants
Yes - this has happened in parts of Australia, particularly the Murray Darling basin which has been subject to irrigation and has a very salty sub-surface in parts. I've seen the damage of too much irrigation in these areas and many rice farms for example have been abandoned and turned into cattle & sheep pastures instead
False! There is no environmental crisis in the creat barrier reef. The corals are white by nature, when not overgrown by other organisms. The reef is growing and bigger than ever.
@@atlet1 u sure bro
@@atlet1 are you taking the piss
@@atlet1 where did you get that information from? Facebook? Back to school for you, this time pay attention
In a time of changing climate, and especially sea level, the Bradfield plan should not be forgotten. But the priority should not be an Inland Sea for the purpose of farming -- that is decades away. The priority should be to change the micro-climates of inland Austrialia, even if it means augmenting the original scheme presented here with Ocean water, made all the more possible with raised Sea-levels. Evaportion will be huge over such an immense, hot and dry locale, but it will have to fall as rain at some point in the high-lands. If this is never attempted, inland Australia will burn anyway, and there will no crops to speak of, ever again.
Very interesting, I was reminded of the Soviet Union’s scheme(s) in Central Asia, which led to the diminution of the Aral Sea! Man’s ingenuity to alter his physical environment needs to be tempered with humility. However once momentum behind such schemes builds up, it may become difficult to stop especially as it could be promoted as flood control/prevention. As an understatement, Australia is hardly in the vanguard,when it comes to environmentalism.
We don't have anything like the Aral Sea in Australia's Red Centre.
@@deanpd3402 Yep, we're doing the opposite of the Soviets - trying to create one. "It's too hard, let's not try. There's no point learning through small failures along the journey".
Considering how the government has tormented the people with their handling of health matters, I would fight their efforts to be involved with water issues.
Very well put. Hubris was our downfall, if only we had trusted nature to do what it does best and just assisted. I hope others can learn from or avoid our species mistakes.
@@tepidtuna7450 ‘small failures’ in that journey lead to catastrophic consequences for Flora and Fauna, many permanent.
The US has a Hoover Dam, and Australia has a Herbert Dam!
😂
I wonder if it would be possible to establish forests in the water basin instead of just intensive agriculture.
So you want to spend a bunch of money on a huge project and then decide to drastically reduce the potential amount of income it could make.
@@rory6984 can't you make money from wood?
It would help slow climate change.
@@PalleRasmussen Those trees would absorb a lot of carbon dioxide.
@@chrismiller5198 and provide lots of habitat
Irrigating the interior is going to severely damage the coastal ecosystems in Australia. The Murray is hanging on by a thread, if that. The East coast has been dealing with flooding for decades and it's only getting worse. There's a reason why we have semi-tropical geography at the same latitudes as what is temperate in the Americas and Africa. There are often water restrictions in places like the Gold Coast, or northern NSW. Most of the East Coast has high water tables which will be massively impacted by the change of water pressure across the Great Dividing Range. We don't need to regreen our deserts, we need to regreen the areas that were originally green. The areas which were thriving forests before they were cleared for timbers and for pasture.
I'm not anti-capitalism. In fact, I think there is greater long term value (including economic) in reviving existing pastures, and not attempting to regreen the desert. The best example is in the example given in the video. The Ord reservoirs are not re-greening the desert, they actually rehydrated old forests that had been turned into pasture.
What you said specifically here "The Ord reservoirs are not re-greening the desert, they actually rehydrated old forests that had been turned into pasture." Will go over everyone's head as they don't appreciate the simple importance of saturating land mass through reservoirs. The amount of constant flow needed and the science behind the exact right size to not only feed the human population, our farmland but also top up and pressurize water tables(At their many many levels) Is not understood. All that and more must happen at a perfectly calculated rate if you want to push it to its limits, which these people clearly want to do. In my experience via years of research and fascination with water is that the its always better to build many small reservoirs and dams in exactly the right position using nature as your only guide. Not politicians, not grand ideas or needs. If nature is telling you no, listen or fall at the wayside.
I would love to hear about more TERRAFORMING efforts across the countries of the world. Very interesting stuff.
I do too, since I'm generally supportive of terraforming concepts, assuming the consequences have been thought out.
You only have to look at Geoff Lawtons greening the desert project in Jordan to realise that with the right actions and available resources that a good portion of this is actually possible. It just will take a bit of time.
If it doesn’t make short term profit for corporations, democratic nations won’t bother investing in it. All the less democratic nations are already doing this work. Check out the Chinese, African and Arabian greening projects. They require long term patient investment but eventually will benefit their nations in self sufficiency. Authoritarian governments can dictate speedy transitions into this type of investment and make it happen by mobilising their population to all participate, unlike western democratic nations. There are obviously pros and cons to all forms of government.
@@PikachooUpYou Get real, even poor communities in Africa are doing it. You don't need money, you just need people. If you bother to do a search right here, you would know how wrong you are.
I like a lot of Geoff Lawtons' ideas, as well as Peter Andrews'.
I think the best way to green the outback would be to create leaky weirs/check/sand dams along the creeks and rivers that feed into Lake Eyre and the surrounding lakes at X kilometre intervals.
It might take 100 years after they have been constructed to grow biomass a create permanent slow-flowing streams but it would be worth it
its sick how humanity wants to destroy and change EVERY SINGLE THING
@@brad1669 Peter Andrews has definitely done a lot of good also. I wouldn't mind to do one of his natural sequence farming courses one day.
It's a hard one for someone inexperienced like myself to say but you could well be on the right track with that idea. The hardest thing is getting any government body to listen to men like these and actually implement long term plans that aren't solely based on their next damn election win.
Fantastic report, I learned something here.
From Australia. You are dreaming mate....
Should do the next Caspian Report on the new security pac power play between Beijing and Honiara and the potential impact on the sealanes to the Australian and New Zealand population centres 😊
The Solomon Islands should be a British colony again, because they clearly can't govern themselves properly by allowing an ever-increasingly belligerent China to set up a military base there.
Yes! I am a journalist on UA-cam and my next video will be on this topic!
I have been to the Solomon’s before and I find it both fascinating and inevitable.
So much of their economy already relies on China, lots of the stores and restaurants in Honiara are owned by Chinese people.
I truly pray that this project comes to mad fruition !
flood plane harvesting has caused masive damage thoughout the out back, massive fish die-offs and blue-green algae has destroyed so much. This appears to do the same thing.
Good points
Lae Erye is pronounced Lake "Air"
also spelt ‘eyre’
What's a "Lae"?
Insane it is! With Scomo and Palletjack you would be lucky if they could work out that there was shit in a sewage plant, let a lone understand what you are proposing.
Love your content. Pls keep up the great work 👍🏼
This seems like a bigger version of what the Saudis are trying to do to modernize and make their country more habitable but with less focus on agriculture and more on getting fresh drinking water
Yes! I am a geopolitical youtuber and i did read an article that was describing the similarities between the Saudi Arabian and the Australian infrastructure project!
This scheme was proposed by Bradfield in 1938, and is suggested occasionally. It has two main problems. The amount of water is less than he calculated and the water needs to flow uphill in some areas. As a result it is uneconomic.
Stop being cheems.
Ahh yed, the pessimistic one
Just as the video mentions at around 9:00, but continues to explore further terraforming projects and discourse since then
yet somehow we get water 450km inland and half a kilometre above sea level so the people who live in WA's goldfields don't die of thirst. I hear they use these high falutin' inventions called "pumps" to push the water through some new fangled contraption called "pipes." Signs and wonders!
The only projects our current government seem to care about is coal mining or fracking for gas.
If it won't exclusively benefit a small number of rich, connected business interests then the Liberals won't do it.
As an Australian myself, I find this plan to be very intriguing. I can imagine flourishing grasslands and fields around Uluru, and perhaps Alice Springs becoming a sprawling city due to more agricultural production that isn’t limited by the dry red soil. It’d be more like America or Europe with more settlements inland rather than most of us being stuck up on the East Coast. I’d be glad to let this plan make way, and it’d be a thrilling accomplishment which might make this country prosper.
As an Australian and an environmental scientist I can say you mustn't have been to Alice Springs yet. That landscape IS a flourishing grassland...seasonally, when the rains come. All of the plants and animals out there have adapted to dry seasonal, cyclical conditions. There's beauty in the ephemeral nature of life out there, and the red of the dry is as amazing and thr verdant green of the wet. This idea that everything in Australia is shit until we get our grubby hands in and change it is what I like least about our country. Take a helicopter ride over the West MacDonnell Ranges and see the cycads and the rock wallabies, or witness an Eyrean Grasswren calling on top of a sand dune at dawn, and then come back and tell me how much better the Centre would be with more Stockland Shopping Centres and fucking lawn ornaments.
Ahahah our government has failed building a simple train line between our few major cities for decades now. This won't happen anytime soon.
Video starts at 03:09
Fighting geography will always cost much more than to align with it.
Australia needs to do some kind of inland water diversion, the inland areas are on the path to complete inhability, this land was once flush with wildlife, there's no reason to not return it to its former glory if the downsides can be curtailed.
There are actually underwater reservoirs that are remnants of the great inland sea, such as the Great Artesian Basin.
The issue here is that coal seam gas extraction and other types of mining threaten the viability of the water for drinking or agriculture.
Edit: I'm commenting as I watch. It seems bore water might support a small town but perhaps not mass agriculture.
Tunnels might very well be a reasonable way to transport flood waters or desalinated water but the costs required to construct those tunnels would be immense and very disruptive existing ecosystems and land.
I agree with your comment that inland water diversion could do some good things if we do it right.
Water diversion is the current problem, because rich twats use floodplains to grow cotton (very high water needs), stop it travelling downstream and refuse to report the water they take
If we can’t even terraform a desert on our home planet, how do people expect us to be able to terraform mars?
As someone who loves in one of the regions they want to 'greenify', they've been balling ideas like this about for decades, it won't happen.
Biggest couple issues is a lot of desert areas have high water tables and lots of salt, one wrong move and your inland freshwater lakes become the next dead sea.
And the other is people really underestimate temperatures, in summer 45*C is not uncommon, but can easily drop into the negatives during winter, realistically, if you even do manage to create this huge food bowl, what food grows in those sort of temperature ranges?
You grow seasonally.
The massive food production in the US largely occurs in areas that have brutal winters & very hot summers.
@@pewpewTN Comparing Australian outback with America will bring you undone very quickly. They are 2 completely different places. In saying that farming is done very successfully in the extremes Australia does throw up. Farmers for generations have dealt with years of drought (6 to 8 years is not uncommon) then flooding rains. Super hot to super cold, super dry to super wet, that is Australia. Australia has some amazingly furtile plains. They just need to be managed properly which greedy corperations after short term gain and the goverment hungry for the money don't do.
For the land and the people it has over the last 50 years become a lose lose battle not many of the city and coastal fringe dwellers are unaware of. Their steak is found in the supermarket where it came from or how it was produced they have no idea.
tbf the riverina region in NSW is a massive food bowl and gets 45˚c in summer and regular frosts. you grow different foods, some are good in frost but others a good in heat.