OASIS Overseas Arid Soil Irrigation Solution
Operation OASIS Answers all of the questions about how this can be achieved by using the massive waste water problem in human bodily waste (Humanure) and Excess farm waste that currently causes pollution and costs countless £billions to process throughout the world, by anaerobically treating and transporting the treated waste to where soils are arid and devoid of water and organic material. (deserts).
No other species removes nutrients and water from the soil like us and no other species has a problem with distributing their waste products as manure and urea back to the soil, apart from those kept in intensive farming. In fact nature has a design to spread the seeds of trees and plants through the bowls of flying and grazing animals that drop them over great distances as pellets surrounded by the best growing medium there is. In fact, many seeds pass though our own gut and are excreted unharmed ready to germinate into more plants to give us even more food. We just need to step back and look at the beauty of natural processes and embrace the idea that we have produced a wonderful organically rich by product from our amazingly varied diets and that this product must be returned to where the soils require organic material, nutrients, trace minerals and most of all an abundant free source of H2O, without which nothing can survive.
Desertification is currently spreading at an unprecedented rate, like a virulent plague and must be halted if we as a species are to remain in existence!
But how can we begin to address thousands of years of poor soil husbandry?
The answer is surprisingly simple.
By using the capacity of super tankers or bulk crude oil tankers, VLCC's and ULCC's which return to Desert coastlines after offloading their crude oil cargo. Instead of filling up the ballast tanks with sea water in order to lower the propeller and vast hulls to create stability for no financial gain. In fact it costs them money waiting to refill their tanks with sea water, sterilising the entire contents to avoid introducing oceanic born microbes and species of plants and marine animals and then discharging the ballast back into the ocean, a practice that is being phased out with strict legislation.
There is an interesting alternative practical and economically viable use for ballast that has the potential to irrigate and fertilise vast expanses of desert coastline and favourably change the local climate, causing ocean born fog, mist and rainfall to sustain new forests and farmland, providing renewable resources and food for our ever expanding population.
Fossilized forests can be found in many arid regions, proving there was once abundant rainfall and that the sandy stony soils were once capable of soaking up and storing the rains that once fell with regularity. Remove the tropical rainforests and desertification is sure to follow. The process of creating deserts by remove the organic material from the soils by flash floods, erosion and wind desertification is obvious when all you are left with are grains of sand and rocks and rains flow through the lands as seen in Australia's recent devastating floods, which were referred to as an inland tsunami. Again very bad soil management over thousands of years of burning, a practice used by Aborigines, possibly just to kill snakes, compounded by years of commercial cash crops, and grazing millions of sheep and cattle.
Loading up tankers with treated waste water would provide tanker companies with a much needed paid return cargo that could occupy their entire carrying capacity and would digest the crude oil and waste water while stored at the donor countries and on route to the deserts where a waiting storage vessel finishes the anaerobic process transferring the valuable nutrient rich waste water to the arid coastlines for reforestation.
Immediately you irrigate sandy soils with treated waste water and suspended solids, something magical happens to the grains of sand. The sand becomes soil again and all the gaps in between the grains are filled with water absorbing life giving organic matter and organisms quickly start the same processes that have sustained the Earth's fertility far longer than humans have taken to destroy it.
A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A Pilot Project along a 4 kilometre strip of arid coastland, will show that moisture from the ocean will once again be able to cross onto the land and sustain the new forests, rolling back the deserts from the coastlines is the reverse of how deserts were formed in the first place.
Mankind and many other species have removed vegetation from the coastlines, lakes and river banks of continents. Dinosaurs can be forgiven as they had no perception of what they were doing to the forests inland, as the rains began to fail and forest fires decimated the inland vegetation. This is an inevitable consequence of removing vegetation from coastal areas and can be seen all around the world. In Brazil for example, great swathes of forests have been removed recently and already we can see a huge reduction in rainfall and the beginning of desertification. Majorca for example, a tiny island in the Mediterranean sea has two obvious climates. On the East side of the island it rains far more frequently and on some days it can be a blistering heatwave on the more commercially exploited West side and it can be raining profusely on the East side where forests touch the sea.
Removing forest from a coastline causes the soils to degrade rapidly where not managed sufficiently. Once the soils are dried out, wind erosion rapidly removes the organic material from the soil. The great American dust bowl of the 1930's demonstrated how billions of tons of once fertile soil was blown away on the winds, causing the complete collapse of the farming industry. So bad was the devastation that trees were left clinging by the tips of their roots to the land, and the basements floors of houses became level with the remaining poor quality soil.
Once heated up by the sun and lack of cooling water, a thermal barrier is put in place that causes an up-well of heated dry air that draws in dry air from the inner continent and moist air from the ocean. The density of the moist air from the ocean increases as the air cools faster than the dry air on the coast side and falls back towards the sea when cooled. This causes moisture to roll around the coastlines rather than crossing on to the land and it is this process that causes forests to become tinder dry and burn intensely as frequently seen in many country’s, none more publicised than the multimillion dollar homes going up in smoke in California.
So by re-introducing forests instead of removing forests we can begin to address and restore the hydrological water cycle and by doing so we can also address the uneven distribution of rainfall around the World.
The obvious point here is that if it's raining less in one area, it must be raining harder in another, something so obvious for all to see with more and more flash floods, mud slides and forest fires looming on the horizon do we really have to wait to see how much worse things can get before action is required?