China wants to artificially rain on an Alaskan-sized area
China is a country of exaggeration. In addition to having a huge territorial extension, second only to Russia and Canada, this is where the largest population on the planet is located - 1.396 billion people live there. And things don't stop there: Chinese engineering projects are also usually gigantic, including monstrous dams and other architectural wonders.
That's why you couldn't expect anything less when a project to make artificial rain was detailed (as far as possible) by a South China Morning Post story. Called Tianhe in Chinese, which means something like “river in the sky, ” the system being developed by the Chinese government aims to make it rain more on the highlands of Tibet, a region that suffers a lot from climate change and is of great economic importance. For the country.
Military technology
Chinese officials estimate an additional 10 billion cubic meters of rainfall will be produced each year
What is known about the grand project is that it was born among the Chinese military and is derived from the climate change program of the Armed Forces of China. That's right: it is an idea capable of causing damage to enemy countries by generating natural - in this case artificial - disasters such as storms and other weather storms. Behind Tianhe is China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, a state defense company that is also responsible for the Chinese space program.
To make the project work, a large network of combustion chambers will be installed in the mountains of Tibet. They will “seed” clouds with silver iodide particles, and the result will be increased rainfall in a region that spans 1.6 million square kilometers, the equivalent of Alaska or about three times the size of Spain. . Chinese officials estimate that an additional 10 billion cubic meters of rainfall will be produced each year, representing approximately 7% of China's total water consumption.
Water to the Chinese rivers
The great importance of the Tibetan mountains is that there are born the main rivers that cross China, and all this rain would increase the volume of water and better irrigate the surrounding land, having an immediate and very positive reflection on the economy of the country. .
In the end, China's ambitious project may either fail or even worsen the situation.
However, of course there are dangers to this project, such as the impact these artificial climate changes can have on local nature. Meteorologists and other experts in the field indicate that generating rain artificially is very complicated and can have bad consequences. In the end, China's ambitious project may not work out or even worsen the situation. Only deeper and more detailed studies will tell what can happen if the system is actually created.
China wants to artificially rain over Alaska-sized area via TecMundo
