Monday, May 3, 2010

Greening the Sahara

This incredibly ambitious green design project aims to turn the Sahara Desert – one of the most notoriously inhospitable environments on Earth – into a lush green paradise. Concentrated solar power is used to generate energy for the complex and to evaporate seawater to use in greenhouses (as opposed to depleting freshwater sources). However, this is not a self-contained system – extra distilled freshwater and nutrients from the seawater as well as conditioned air will be released to create adjacent exterior micro-climates more conducive to growing even in the outdoors, slowly changing the whole ecosystem back to something it hasn't resembled for thousands of years and that can provide food, water and power in one of the most environmentally foreboding places on the planet.

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