Scientists figure out how to turn desert sand into fertile soil

 A new process which turns desert sand into fertile soil relatively quickly

China has invented a method using 3.5 billion-year-old microbes to turn desert sand into fertile soil in just 10 months. These microbes stabilize sand and protect ecosystems, allowing restoration teams to plant shrubs and grasses. The process involves spraying lab-grown cyanobacteria on straw checkerboards, which harden into a cohesive layer that prevents wind erosion. This innovation accelerates the desert restoration process, which typically takes decades, to just a few years. However, long-term protection from vehicles and heavy foot traffic is necessary to maintain the restored surface. Scientists have used lab-grown microbes to bind loose desert sand into a thin, stable layer which wind cannot easily blow away. The stronger surface gives restoration teams time to plant shrubs and grasses before harsh winds and heat wipe out young plants...crusts stabilize sand within 10 to 16 months. On straw checkerboards laid across northwest China, a dark film spread over treated sand and stayed after seasonal dust storms. Tracking those plots through heat and frost, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) documented how fast the film hardened. In trials near the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang in northwest China, CAS teams saw crusts stabilize sand within 10 to 16 months. Even with that speed, planners focused on building the soil base first, so later plants could survive without constant replanting.

When fertile land becomes desert, farmers are forced to leave. Fewer farms means fewer crops, which exacerbates global hunger, particularly in the poorest corners of the world. Chinese want to reverse this process. Using a technique called “desert soilization”, they are turning barren desert into productive, farmable land at an affordable cost and time. Climate change is turning more of the Earth’s land into inhospitable desert. When fertile land becomes barren, farmers cannot grow crops, meaning more hunger, particularly in the poorest parts of the world. Our solution transforms dry plains into productive pastures. We think we have found a solution to rising food insecurity. Long before forests existed, cyanobacteria, sunlight-powered bacteria which thrive in harsh places, likely appeared about 3.5 billion years ago. Using sunlight and air, many strains pull CO2 into their cells and leak the leftovers as simple organic matter. In desert soils short on fertilizer, some species perform nitrogen fixation, turning nitrogen gas into plant-ready nutrients for the crust community. Once they take hold, their living layer binds loose grains and gives the first plants a better place to root. Under a microscope, biological soil crusts, thin living layers on soil surfaces, show a mesh of bacterial threads wrapped around sand grains. To hold that mesh together, cells ooze sticky sugars between grains, and those sugars harden into a thin, cohesive layer. The crust acts like glue by holding sand grains together and helping prevent invasive plants from taking root. Footsteps, tires and hard raking can break the surface, so building crusts at scale also needs long-term protection.

Over the first year, the treated surface began holding nutrients near the top inch instead of letting dust blow away. Mixing with drifting mineral dust, dead cells and leaked sugars formed organic matter which helped trap N2 and P. As nutrients concentrated, more microbes could feed on them, and the crust community became harder to disturb. For seedlings, that change created a better starting point, but survival still depended on rain arriving at the right time. After short rains, a crusted patch kept moisture closer to the surface, while nearby bare sand dried out quickly. Rough pores and dark pigments reduced evaporation, because water stayed shaded and trapped under the thin layer. Moisture held for even a few extra days can help grasses and shrubs sprout roots before heat returns. During long dry spells, the living crust can go dormant, so results depend on climate and careful timing. Soilization mixes a water-based paste with sand and applies it to the desert surface, giving it the same physical and ecological properties as soil, with the same capacity for water and fertiliser retention and ventilation.

Wind provides the harshest test, and bare sand fails it when gusts pick up and carry grains away. After spraying cyanobacteria, bound grains stayed put because the crust linked them, so fewer particles lifted into the air. Lab tests with a manufactured crust cut wind-driven soil loss by more than 90% in controlled winds. Less blowing sand could mean fewer sandstorms and longer-lived roads, but the crust must survive traffic and grazing pressure. With time, the crust changed from mostly microbes to a mixed cover which included lichens and small moss patches. Lichens added a tougher surface, and their slow growth helped keep the crust intact during high winds and cold nights. Moss brought extra height and shade, which let tiny pockets of moisture linger and sheltered new microbes. Once those later partners arrived, the system became more stable, but damage also took longer to heal. As crops grow and roots decay, the soilized sand becomes self-sustaining. The solution is proven, with 1,130 hectares of arable land, already created in multiple locations of Ulan Buh desert, at an altitude of 1100 meters in northern China. The technique is so effective that the yield of some crops increases even up to four times. By converting desert sand into farmable land, the solution provides secure incomes to the world’s remotest communities.

Scaling this method beyond plots forces hard choices about where to spray microbes, since not every dune needs crust. Local strains often handle heat, salt and drought better than imported ones, so teams usually culture microbes from nearby deserts. Because desertification, land losing plant cover and becoming more desert-like, has many causes, crusts cannot solve overgrazing or water misuse. Without protection from vehicles and heavy foot traffic, a restored surface can crumble, and recovery may take years. Behind today’s fast trials sits a record from China which followed crust growth across 59 years of desert recovery. Using crust samples with known ages, the team compared untouched sites with plots treated with lab-grown cyanobacteria. Nutrient gains matched which microbes dominated, and adding cyanobacteria shortened a decades-long process to just years. Even in the best cases, that still meant waiting two to three years for a mature crust which resists disturbance. Fast crust building turns microbial growth into a practical tool, linking desert sand control with slower, plant-based restoration. Long-term monitoring will show whether durability, benefits and side effects hold across different deserts and climates of the world.

Muhammad (Peace be upon him) Name

 

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Antarctica’s gravity hole is getting stronger

 Scientists reveal that Antarctica’s gravity hole is growing stronger

Although Earth is approximately spherical, its gravity field doesn't adhere to the same geometry. In visualizations, it more closely resembles a potato, with bumps and divots. For decades, scientists have been studying intriguing “gravity holes,” which are enormous depressions in the Earth’s crust where the effects of gravity are significantly lower than average. One of the strongest of these depressions, where the gravity field is weaker, lies under Antarctica. Now, new models of how the so-called Antarctic Geoid Low evolved over time have shown that it's only getting stronger, driven by the long, slow movement of rock deep below Earth's surface, like a giant shifting in its sleep. "If we can better understand how Earth's interior shapes gravity and sea levels, we gain insight into factors that may matter for the growth and stability of large ice sheets," says geophysicist Alessandro Forte of the University of Florida. It’s an especially pertinent phenomenon in the Antarctic, a region which has seen significant changes not just due to global warming, but far longer-term climate changes spanning tens of millions of years, long before the emergence of humans and their environmentally disastrous footprint on the planet. The effects of gravity are particularly weak beneath the icy continent when accounting for our planet’s rotation, the result of slow rock movements deep beneath the ice.

Earth's geoid, the bumpy potato shape of the gravitational field, is uneven because gravity is linked to mass, and the mass distribution inside the planet is uneven, due to different rock compositions having different densities. It's not a huge difference that you'd notice at the surface. Maps tend to exaggerate it so we can see what's going on; if you weighed yourself at a geoid low and a geoid high, the difference would be just a few grams. Nevertheless, the geoid represents a window into processes deep inside Earth that we can't observe directly. University of Florida geophysics professor Alessandro Forte and Paris Institute of Earth Physics researcher Petar Glišović found that these rock movements are correlated to major changes in Antarctica’s climate, suggesting how the area’s gravity shifts may have allowed its ice sheets to grow. The pair created a detailed map of the Antarctic’s “gravity hole” to study how it changed over millions of years, using a wealth of global earthquake recordings from across the planet. “Imagine doing a CT scan of the whole Earth, but we don’t have X-rays like we do in a medical office,” said Forte. “We have earthquakes. Earthquake waves provide the ‘light’ that illuminates the interior of the planet.”

Forte and his colleague, generated a detailed map of the Antarctic Geoid Low using another window into Earth's interior: earthquakes. Seismic waves from earthquakes travel through the planet, changing speed and direction as they encounter materials with different compositions and densities. Using the earthquake data, the researchers constructed a 3D density model of Earth's mantle and extrapolated it into a new map of the entire planetary geoid. They compared this map with the gold-standard gravity data collected by satellites and found it to be a close match. This was the easy part. The next step was to try to turn back the clock to assess how the geoid has evolved since the early Cenozoic. Using computer models, the team reconstructed the state of Antarctic’s gravity hole 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. They determined that the hole has gained strength over tens of millions of years, coinciding with major changes in the continent’s climate system and the widespread formation of glaciers, which in turn, had sweeping effects on sea levels the acidity of our planet’s oceans. While the findings aren’t a definitive causal link between the two, rock movements and shifting gravity causing ice to grow, Forte and Glišović are hoping to test whether sea level changes may be directly influenced by this strengthening gravity hole.

Forte and Glišović fed their map into a physics-based model of Earth's mantle convection, rewinding Earth's interior geological activity to see how the geoid evolved over that timeframe. Then, from their starting point, they let the model run forward to see if it could reproduce the geoid we see today. They also checked whether their model reproduced real changes in Earth's rotational axis known as True Polar Wander. It arrived at the current geoid and matched the polar wander, suggesting it also provides an accurate representation of the geoid's evolution. “How does our climate connect to what’s going on inside our planet?” Forte asked rhetorically in the statement. “If we can better understand how Earth’s interior shapes gravity and sea levels, we gain insight into factors that may matter for the growth and stability of large ice sheets.” The results showed that the Antarctic Geoid Low is not a new development; a gravitational depression has been sitting near Antarctica since ages. But it hasn't remained static. About 50 million years ago, its position and strength started to change dramatically, timing that matches a sharp bend in the polar wander.

According to the model, the anomaly formed as tectonic slabs sub ducted beneath Antarctica and sank deep into the mantle, altering the planet's gravity field at the surface. Meanwhile, a broad region of hot, buoyant material rose upward, becoming more influential over the past 40 million years and strengthening the geoid low. Interestingly, this may be linked to the glaciation of Antarctica, which began in earnest around 34 million years ago. It's only a speculative link, but here's the interesting thing about the geoid: it shapes sea level. So, as the geoid shifted downward around Antarctica, the local sea surface would have lowered with it, potentially influencing the growth of the ice sheet. That's obviously a hypothesis which requires further testing. However, the work does show that different geodynamic processes, from mantle convection to the geoid to the motion of the poles, can all be connected and influence each other. The gravity hole under Antarctica may be subtle, but it is a reminder that even the slowest processes deep inside Earth can leave a lasting impression on the world above for us.

Muhammad (Peace be upon him) Name