Tell me about the desert.

A desert has existed for 40 million years; There is a desert that meets the "city wall"; Another desert may soon supply most of Europe's electricity.

Of course, from space, our planet looks like a blue marble filled with water, but one third of the earth's land surface is partially or completely desert.

The largest desert in the world is Antarctica. Yes, an area doesn't have to be very hot to be called a desert-it just needs to lose more water than it gets.

It never rains in parts of Atacama Desert in Chile. Scientists believe that some parts of this desert have been in an extreme desert state for 40 million years, which is longer than anywhere on earth.

However, more than 654.38 million people live in Atacama today. Farmers draw enough water from underground aquifers and snowmelt streams to grow crops and raise camels and alpacas.

If you get lost in the desert, you don't have to pee on your shirt, and then put it on your head like Baye to prevent you from dying of thirst. You can get water from some branches of palm trees (such as brie and rattan).

6. Contrary to legend, cactus is not completely safe and reliable. If you want to sip a bucket of cactus, you need a machete to cut it open-if you choose the wrong kind, it will give you a headache and diarrhea.

Besides, if you get lost in the desert, headache and diarrhea may not be your biggest problem.

8. You'd better find a cactus fruit. But wait until evening, so that the condensed water will not be consumed.

Reza Paklavin, a 36-year-old market security analyst in London, spent 1 13 days, 5 hours and 50 minutes, riding at 20 1 1 084 miles, setting a world record for cycling across the Sahara desert. He started from Algeria, rode south, and then went east through Niger and Chad to Sudan.

10. Paklavin's guide drags 6000 calories of food and 7 liters of water he consumes every day.

1 1. Maybe next time he will drive on the 2,900-mile trans-Saharan highway, which connects Lagos, the most populous city in Africa, with Algeria and Tunisia.

12. Workers working on the expressway occasionally find dehydrated bodies.

13. In order to build a road through the Mauritanian desert, engineers erected nylon curtains and planted drought-tolerant trees to block sand dunes. Extreme temperature fluctuations lead to tree death and road deformation. The multi-layer subgrade composed of shells has solved the road surface bending, but the quicksand is still uncertain.

14. Due to climate change and deforestation, about 46,000 square miles of arable land become desert every year. According to United Nations statistics, desertification threatens the livelihood of 65,438 countries110 billion people.

15. Every year, about 1000 square miles of land in China become desert, which leads to sandstorms that ravage the earth.

16. In the northeast of China, the "Great Green Wall" of shrubs and trees is being planted, which may revive the edge of Gobi Desert. It finally extends from the outskirts of Beijing to Inner Mongolia, with a total length of 2,800 miles.

17. Combating desertification does not require high technology. In Burkina Faso, a village placed stones to slow down runoff and dug pits to collect rainwater, which only increased food production by 50%.

18. Gerhard Knies, a German particle physicist, calculated that deserts in the world get more energy from the sun in six hours than human beings consume in one year. The Sahara Desert stretches for 865,438+000 square miles, the size of Wales, and may provide electricity for the whole of Europe.

19. This calculation gave birth to the desert industry action plan in 2009, which aims to build a solar and wind energy network from Africa to the Middle East. It will transmit electricity to Europe through high-voltage DC cables.

20. The desert industry action plan will cost about 500 billion US dollars, but by 2050, this plan can provide Europe with enough renewable and pollution-free electricity to meet the power demand of Europe 15%.