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Desertification in Romania (2020)
- leafmeal 5y agoI always wondered if this happened in the middle east, with essentially the same cause. It seems hard for me to imagine that the "cradle" of civilization began in such an arid place, though it would be quite fitting if civilization transformed it.
- bpodgursky 5y ago1. The whole Sahara + mideast was a lot greener a few thousand years ago due to ice ages et al, not due to soil depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period 2. The Euphrates floodplain is still quite green, like the Nile's. It's not like the US midwest where you have thousands of square miles of grass, but you do have a strip of extremely reliably fertile land (and for civilization-building, reliable seasons are super important).
- ncmncm 5y agoUntil 8000 years ago most of the present Persian Gulf was fertile valley. It is a good bet that archaeological sites critically important to understanding the rise of civilization are under it now. Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry. In the Amazon basin and along the northwest coast of North America, trees were the basis of productive agriculture, carefully chosen mixes of trees of different sizes and species. To this day the Amazon basin is dominated by tree species that were once cultivated throughout, supporting tens of millions until they were wiped out by smallpox and other pandemics. In North America, such tree gardens can still be found centuries after they were abandoned.
- hulitu 5y ago> Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry. Trees alone do not help. There are a lot of tree farms which do not capture moisture and are prone to forest fires. We need forests with good ecosystems not tree plantations.
- ncmncm 5y agoPlanting trees (particularly the wrong ones) might not help much, but cutting down trees seems to reliably do harm.
- oh_sigh 5y agoThat's why the Tigris/Euphrates was so important. Even to this day, despite recent mucking about with waterflow, there is still a fairly large series of swamplands/marshes in southern Iraq that most people don't imagine when they are asked to describe the geography of Iraq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes
- edgyquant 5y agoFrom everything I’ve read the Middle East used to be a kind of paradise. Maybe not as lush as Central Europe or Southern Asia but it was not as arid as it is now. The common reason is that early agriculture was not efficient, or understood, and sometime in the Bronze Age an equivalent of the Great Dust Bowl occurred as Early societies basically salted the Earth they depended on (completely on accident.) Also certain places, e.g, Israel, were actual forests just 10-12,000 years ago.
- syrrim 5y agoI believe it had to do with the way they irrigated. They would flood their fields, which would leave sediment from the river as the water evaporated. The sediment contained salt, which slowly accumulated, and made the fields infertile.
- ido 5y agothe last ice age only ended about 12,000 years ago[0]. The fertile crescent and ancient egypt's golden age was half way from then to today & the climate was a lot cooler overall. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
- Ericson2314 5y agoBut how does that square with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period ?
- ido 5y agoThis was thousands of years later (significantly closer to our time than it was to the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent - remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us). Climate isn't linear and that was one of several fluctuations, but 5000-6000 years ago it was cooler in that area than today.
- crishoj 5y agoAn ambitious project to regreen the Sinai desert, with John D. Liu, known for successfully greening the barren Loess Plateau: https://www.greenthesinai.com/home https://www.greenthesinai.com/home
- kingsuper20 5y agoGoats.
- lebuffon 5y agoThere are references in the bible to the "un-penetrable forests of Lebanon". That's on the order of 3K years ago. I would think that the the cause is complex but humans removing trees until they are gone is probably part of the problem.
- sb057 5y agoMore than the Bible; the cedars of Lebanon were perhaps the single-most famous natural land feature in the ancient near east. You'll find references to them in virtually every ancient text of the area that has any length, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoInteresting to get some context here on Oltenia. Coming from Transylvania, where water is good and plentiful (often coming straight down from the mountains), I was shocked at how parched many of the villages I cycled through were, and how bad the water from the wells they relied on often was.
- GrayShade 5y agoTo add insult to injury, we're also destroying the trees in the cities and along roads, and people are quite happy with that. I've literally had conversations that went like "Why do we need all these for? You have a drink or two, crash into a tree and die. They should cut all of them". For some context, Romania has about the highest road fatalities per capita in the EU.
- vladvasiliu 5y agoThat sounds like a different issue. They wanted to cut the trees along the roads in France too for similar. They wanted to remove the trees up to a certain distance which I can't remember. The issue is that whole forests are being removed. If they weren't, removing a bunch of trees along the roads for safety wouldn't make that big of a difference. But trees in cities is a different beast, though, and I think it's criminal to remove those, especially in Romania where, thanks communism, there aren't that many trees to begin with.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- GrayShade 5y agoI don't think the cities were in such a bad place before the Revolution, this is a more recent thing. They "prune" the trees by cutting pretty much every branch, then a couple of years down the road they cut them off because they've died. I've seen this happen many times. You're right, of course, those in forests and those in the cities bring different benefits, but most people don't seem to care enough about either.
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- xdennis 5y agoI'm Romanian and I had no idea parts of Oltenia look like this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Sahara+Olteniei%22&t=ffcm&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Sahara+Olteniei%22&t=ffcm&iar=i... Better stock up on turbans because there's no chance we can fix anything.
- jonnycomputer 5y agoAlso California's Central Valley with salination of soil.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- redis_mlc 5y agoFor those who aren't aware of why forests and deserts move around over the millennia, the earth wobbles, then the jet streams change latitude to compensate for the different sun angle. That affects local temperature and rainfall.
- cko 5y agoOh wow. I'm living happily in Transylvania now and had no idea. I thought the rest of Romania was all green. Are bordering countries like Serbia and Bulgaria affected by this? This can't be the only country with unsustainable agricultural practices, right?
- orbital-decay 5y agoUkraine has a desert [1] which is larger than the "Sahara of Oltenia" mentioned in the article. (which also has a link [2] to other deserts in Europe) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleshky_Sands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleshky_Sands (Ukrainian and Russian wiki articles have more details) [2] https://www.travelhouseuk.co.uk/news/destinations/visit-the-startling-deserts-of-europe.htm https://www.travelhouseuk.co.uk/news/destinations/visit-the-...
- petre 5y agoNorthern Bulgaria counties of Vidin and Montana are basically depopulated, shrubs are starting to grow and I've seen lots of animals on the road.
- Spooky23 5y agoThe 2050 version of this will be talking about the Great Plains of the US.
- ddalex 5y agoHaving grown up in Romania, I remember the seasons and general climate being quite different just ~30 years ago, with much colder winters (and lots of snow) and much milder summer where the ~40C heat waves would last just a couple of days in the summer, not weeks on end.
- vixen99 5y agoDo you happen to have a link that points to recorded weather data for the last century that puts numbers alongside your undoubted anecdotal experience? As noted in other comments, here in Transylvania I've seen no such thing. Indeed hot weather seems to have been in increasingly short supply over the past decade or so.
- lucian1900 5y agoSome areas are less affected than others. I grew up in Banat, where I definitely noticed that trend. Every winter came with snow to swim in and 40+ summers were rare, now it's the opposite.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoAnecdotally here in Pretoria South Africa I used to play on the frost before school as a child. Today we never see frost in the winter mornings here anymore.
- dandarie 5y agoI can attest winters were definitely colder in the Moldavian part. I remember two meters of snow, digging tunnels through it and such. And I remember four distinct seasons. Now it's more like a long summer, a long autumn, and short spring and winter.
- koheripbal 5y agoPersonal anecdotes are worthless. no offense intended.
- tzfld 5y agoIt's not something restricted to regions in Romania. Almost all of Eastern Europe is affected at some degree. There are places like [1] in Ukraine or [2] in Central Hungary. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/%D0%A5%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C%2C_%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D1%96%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BA_%D0%9E%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%88%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%B2%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D1%96_%D0%BF%D1%96%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8._%D0%90%D0%B2%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80_%D0%93%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8E%D0%BA_%D0%A1._%D0%92._%285%29.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/%D0%A5%D... [2] https://cdn.nwmgroups.hu/s/img/i/1801/20180108fulophazi-buckavidek4.jpg?w=800&h=533&t=5 https://cdn.nwmgroups.hu/s/img/i/1801/20180108fulophazi-buck...
- Gravityloss 5y ago100000 hectares is 1000 square kilometers or 30 x 30 km. Not a geographically big area yet.
- oblio 5y agoYes, but there was nothing like it before. The local climate is temperate.
- orbital-decay 5y agoSure - but it's a bit like seeing a desert in Maine or Quebec. Until Middle Ages, most of Europe used to be one huge forest.