Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region will soon complete its monumental project of looping around Taklimakan Desert, China's largest desert, with barriers to curb its expansion.
Covering a staggering expanse of over 337,000 square kilometers, Taklimakan, also the world's second largest moving desert, is infamously known as the "Sea of Death".
To stop its dunes from intruding nearby villages, Xinjiang had finished building 2,761 kilometers of barriers of the closed-loop project encircling the whole Taklimakan Desert by the end of 2023.
This year, Xinjiang has constructed about 284 kilometers of barriers for the project, with the remaining one kilometer scheduled to be finished in Yutian County of Hotan Prefecture on Thursday.
The part in Pishan County of Hotan Prefecture, which was completed on Wednesday, uses multiple layers of barriers made with wooden poles and reeds to prevent moving of dunes.
The remaining one kilometer of the project in Yutian County uses several kinds of plants, including trees to block the desert.
According to the results of the sixth national monitoring survey on desertification released at the end of 2022, the areas of desertified land and sandified land had both shrunk in Xinjiang, which thus ended its history of the only provincial-level region in China with expansion of sandified land, and made contributions to consolidating protective barriers for ecological security in northwestern China.
Xinjiang to complete monumental control project on China's largest desert
