April 29, 2020, part of the Taklimakan Desert

NASA satellites show that with the arrival of spring, the Taklimakan Desert is turning green.

The Taklimakan Desert is located in the center of the Tarim Basin. It is the largest desert in China and the second largest mobile desert in the world. 330,000 square kilometers, equivalent to Germany’s land area. About 85% of them consist of mobile dunes, some of which are as high as 200 to 300 meters.

But even in this desert called “Death Sea”, plants will germinate in spring.


February 23, 2020 (top) and April 29, 2020 (bottom) Taklimakan Desert

The medium-resolution imaging spectrometer on NASA satellite Terra collected images of a part of the desert near Hetian on February 23 and April 29, 2020, and found that the desert near Hetian at the end of April was more local than in February. Green appears, NASA said that vegetation is sprouting on the ground.

The annual rainfall in the Taklimakan Desert is extremely low, ranging from 38 millimeters in the west to 10 millimeters in the east. Most of the water needed for plant growth comes from the melting snow in the mountains.

For example, the Karakash River (Moyu River) and Yulong Kashi River (Baiyu River) originating from Kunlun Mountain, water supply mainly depends on the alpine melting snow of Kunlun Mountain (bottom of the image) The river water accounts for 61.2% of the total water volume of each river in the Hetian area, providing valuable water resources for the growth of the Hetian area and plants. The Hetian River formed after the confluence of the two rivers flows into the Tarim River from the south to the north through the Taklimakan Desert and is one of the important sources of the Tarim River.

In recent years, more and more plants have been planted around the Taklimakan Desert, especially around the Tarim Desert Highway. This 500-kilometre highway is the longest in the world Desert highway. In order to protect the expressway from the impact of sand and dust storms, the Tarim Desert Highway had built a 436-kilometer “green corridor” in 2005.