Sahara desert, Buy a camel now?

A few questions on deserts,

Are all deserts expanding at the same rate as the Sahara?
If some estimates say up 60,000 square km become deserts yearly how long does the Earth have before we are all desert nomads?

Is there a way to stop the desert from spreading, and how?

Where does all the sand come from to allow the desert to spread?

Answer some or answer all anxiously awaiting your response as I seen a camel on sale on ebay, want to get it while the prices are cheap :slight_smile:

http://www.virtualglobe.org/en/info/env/06/desert02.html was the site I got some of the info on.

When the soil can no longer hold water, in an area where there is very little rainfall to begin with, you get a desert. Most deserts aren’t made up of the kind of sand you’re probably thinking of, beach sand. They’re just areas covered with very, very, very dry soil. In other words, it isn’t a question of the sand spreading to new areas (though some of it certainly does) - it’s simply a matter of the soil turning into a type of sand.

Deserts do not always equal sand.

The polar regions are deserts when it comes to the amout of moisture falling each year.

The surface area of the earth’s continents is 148,380,000 square kilometers.

Even if it were possible for deserts to spread across the entire surface, it would take 2473 years. I’d hold off on that camel if I were you.

More seriously, there are many different types of deserts, and only about 20% of deserts are composed of sand. Check out the Wikipedia article on Desert.

There has been some success, although not nearly enough, with halting desertification by strategically planting vegetation.

I was very surprised to find that link; it looks as if UNESCO has a mirror site for the now-defunct NGO the World Game Institute; I used to be the research manager for WGI and it turns out that a good deal of the number crunching and text editing of the larger WWW chart depicted was my work! (Work for hire; I have no proprietary interest). Glad to see it lives on in some form.

As far as buying camels; allow me to recommend the once-weekly Berber livestock market in Douz, Tunisia. Haggling is expected. I had a guide in the Sahara in that area who was looking for a nice American bride, I think pretty much any youngish woman with a strong back and good birthin’ hips would do (bleach blonde never hurts), and this nice fellow offered me 10 camels for such a woman. He only had 4 of his own, so this was a big deal; apparently he’d have to finance them in some way. I suggest you find a not too picky gal who hates wet winters and is looking to get hitched and cut her in for 2 camels. That gives her one heck of a dowry, and you get 8 camels for yourself. You should be able to get by on 4 just fine, and the other 4 are pure profit. :wink:

Sometimes I wish I was making up these tales out of whole cloth, I really do…

No. Desertification is a complicated process and proceeds at different rates in different areas depending on local climate and human activity.

That will never happen. Rain has to fall somewhere. You can turn semiarid pasture into what we call “desert” by overgrazing and overfarming it so that the soil blows away. But you can’t turn a really wet area into anything that anybody would ever call a “desert”, no matter how much vegetation you strip away.

If all of us seven billion humans would die, that would probably do the trick. The best minds in science are working on more practical solutions.

As others have pointed out, a desert doesn’t have to be sandy. But desertification does in fact create additional sand, or at least dust. Grasses and shrubs bind the soil, and when humans or their livestock strip away that cover, soil blows away and turns into dust and sand.

Just as a bit of perspective, 10000 years ago, glaciers stripped pretty much all the vegetation from the upper parts of North America. Much more efficiently than human beings could ever accomplish. It all bounced back pretty good. So turning at least the East Coast of the US into a desert would be quite a big job.