The Sahara Desert Used to Look Like This…And May Again

Thousands of years ago, the Sahel region of Africa was a green, lush, tropical paradise. The Great Green Wall initiative is on a mission to restore that greenery in that region across the entire continent. » Subscribe to Seeker! » Watch more Elements! The Great Green Wall is an epic project that aims to grow an 8,000 kilometer belt of vegetation across the entire width of the African continent. If completed, it would be three times larger than the Great Barrier Reef, and be the largest living “structure” on the planet. But can this massive geo-engineering project transform the landscape into the fertile, tropical place it once was? So here’s the thing: this part of Africa is heating up. Particularly in the Sahel, which sits between the southern edge of the world’s largest hot desert, the Sahara, and humid savannas to the south. Vegetation is scarce in this semi-arid belt of land, and the U.N. has identified it as a