According to publicly available records, deserts account for more than one-fifth of the earth's total area, and because the desert climate is very dry, it cannot become a permanent habitat for humans. The continent is vast, including deserts, and the largest desert on the continent is the Taklamakan Desert, which ranks tenth in the world in terms of size and is also the second most mobile desert in the world. And what has always been curious about the Taklamakan Desert is that after digging up its sand, will it reveal a legendary magical scene?
How deep is the Taklamakan Desert?
Taklamakan Desert, with a total length of more than 1,000 kilometers and a width of more than 400 kilometers, covers an area of about 330,000 square kilometers, accounting for nearly half of the total area of the continental desert, and the local average annual precipitation is less than 100 milliliters, but in theory its evaporation value can reach 2,500 milliliters, and the recorded maximum temperature is nearly 80 ° C. For human beings, this environment is indeed as described in the legend, a "forbidden area of life" and a "sea of death".
The mainland has been practicing desert management in a qualitative and orderly manner in domestic desert areas for more than ten years, and the effect of sand control can be called an international model, which has caused many foreign friends to shout that their countries should learn from China. Seeing that the country has a mature method of sand control, many Chinese people have begun to wonder whether the Taklamakan Desert can also be effectively treated with the mainland's current sand control technology.
The first is that the sand in Taklamakan is extremely fluid, which will hinder the survival rate of artificial green plants, that is, it will organize Taklamakan into grasslands. On the other hand, the more fluid the sand, the more difficult it is to rationalize the use of precipitation in the area. Under these two, the sand control technology that has achieved good results in other desert areas of the country is obviously difficult to work in Taklamakan, and even due to the performance of the quicksand, the vegetation planted is directly flowed off as soon as it is planted, which produces great resistance to planting, so it is difficult to achieve effective governance.
Due to the influence of geographical location and climate and other factors, the thickness of sand in the desert is not the same, take the Taklamakan Desert, it is easier to measure, many of which are about 100-200 meters, but due to uneven winds and the influence of quicksand, some of the rare sand dunes can break through 300 meters. These sand dunes, which are two or three hundred meters above the plain, are often prone to form sand walls under the influence of wind.
And because the Taklamakan Desert is located in the center of the basin, it is not only surrounded by high-altitude mountains and plateaus, but also generally belongs to the form of high east and low west. Therefore, the thickness of the sand inside is smaller than the middle large edge, and the thickness gradually increases from east to west. Geologists have surveyed it, and the largest thickness of the local desert can exceed 300 meters, and the thinnest place is about 5-10 meters.
Deserts can also be a gem
I believe many people have heard that there are huge treasure resources under this desert. Experts said that in recent years, the mainland has found many oil and gas fields in the deep hinterland of the Taklamakan Desert, which are stored in rock layers about 60 million to 1.6 million years ago, that is, surface rock layers before cracking and weathering. And it has been proven that the total amount of oil and gas resources contained in it is 16 billion tons of oil equivalent, respectively, 8 billion tons of oil and 10,000 cubic kilometers of natural gas.
Seeing this, many people may begin to wonder why the oil resources contained in the desert with strong quicksand are not flowed away, or they are damaged in the collapse of the quicksand again and again. In fact, this is mainly due to two aspects.
The first is that oil is stored in shale formations, at a depth that is difficult for humans to reach with current mining techniques. Although the quicksand collapse of the desert is unfathomable, no depth of shale formation has been found. On the other hand, it benefits from the topographic structure of this desert, which is in the middle of the basin. Although the plateaus surrounding this desert are in a relatively unstable state, such as the Tian shan mountains in the north, the Kunlun Mountains in the south, and the Palmi Plateau in the west, none of them have affected the desert.
Scientists speculate that the abundance of oil beneath the desert is likely due to the fact that the area was a deep sea hundreds of millions of years ago, not only rich in species, but also with a pleasant climate. Only later in the movement of the earth's crust did it sink deep underground, and the surface was covered with a thick desert.
There are other unknown treasures
There have been countless people who wondered, if you dig up all the sand in the Taklamakan Desert, what is the place below? And the reason why it will cause so widespread curiosity is actually due to its legend, presumably many people have heard that under a certain area of this desert, buried in the ancient city of Loulan.
The ancient city of Loulan is one of the human sites that are fascinated by archaeologists today, and is a famous "country of the city" in the western region. The tip of the iceberg was once found in the desert, but many explorers have since gone to the local area but have nowhere to find it. Even if you are a top expert in the field of mainland archaeology, if you want to investigate the local area, you must first understand the dangers of the local area, after all, the quicksand there is not a joke.
Unlike the widespread saying that the ancient city of Loulan was collapsed by quicksand and entered the depths of the desert at that time, some archaeologists said that it may also be due to the strong local weathering effect, and the "City of the Outline" cracked in the weathering regardless of it, and after the cracking, it was repeatedly cracked under the action of weathering, and finally formed smaller and smaller sand, which eventually became part of the desert.
The ancient city of Loulan in the desert was not found, and it was found that there was actually a lot of water resources in the depths of the ground. Many people may think that there is a lot of water in the desert, is this not a contradiction? In fact, the water commonly used by us humans is the surface water circulating on the surface of the earth, and what is hidden under the desert is groundwater, and groundwater is not easy to develop, especially the groundwater resources hidden deep under the desert are difficult to develop and use.
The magic of many places is that it is often not what it appears on the surface, on the surface it is called the "forbidden area of life" and the "sea of death", but underneath it is the oil resources that human beings need, and even the water resources on which life depends. It may be difficult for today's technology to mine and use these, but I believe that one day in the future, it will eventually become an important resource for the benefit of mankind. To put it simply, if the sand of the Taklamakan Desert is dug up, the following is the treasure of mankind, and it may also be the legendary Loulan Ancient Kingdom, depending on which one netizens are more looking forward to digging first.