China ponders on how to move water

Press, 9 May 1984, Page 22

China ponders on how to move water

NZPA-AP Peking China’s scientists, pondering how to get water from the moist south of China to the parched north, say they may have found the answer: moving the clouds. The official news agency Xinhua reports that scientists are studying the possibility of artificially inducing warm and humid air currents above the Yangtze River source in the western mountains, forming clouds that would drift over the northern half of the country and provide much needed rainfall. The Yangtze and Yellow rivers, China’s longet waterways, originate in the Bayanhar Mountains in western Qinghai province. The Yangtze meanders south-east and has plenty of water that benefits the basin it drains. But the Yellow River, which flows through the north, has little

water and carries large amounts of silt, which causes it to shift course and erode the land. “Many proposals to divert water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River have been put forward,” Xinhua said. “But most projects contemplated would involve huge amounts of engineering and investment” Xinhua said a group of meteorologists and water conservancy experts recently made a 20-day survey of the Bayanhar Mountains and determined it was feasible to create clouds and move them north by means of chemical seeding and electromagnetic currents. This process was not further explained. The agency said scientists would confer later this year on how to execute the project and will experiment on clouds in eastern Qinghai province.