The ‘Great Indian Desert’ could disappear within a century

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https://www.science.org/content/article/great-indian-desert-could-disappear-within-century

By Tanvi Dutta Gupta, Science. 

Excerpt: ...Each year, the South Asian monsoon deluges the verdant east of India and leaves the west, where India and Pakistan share a border, bone-dry. That asymmetry, between the Himalayan rainforests and the “Great Indian Desert”—the most populated in the world—has shaped civilizations. But as climate change heats up, the monsoon is moving farther west into this region. Within a century, a new study suggests, the desert could disappear completely. “This is going to affect a billion people,” says Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography ...the study’s findings portend an increased risk of floods in the Great Indian Desert, also known as the Thar Desert, similar to what happened in 2022, when a deluge in Pakistan displaced 8 million people and caused almost $15 billion in property damage....Most studies predict that Earth’s deserts will grow with global warming. The Sahara desert, for example, is expected to expand more than 6000 square kilometers per year by 2050. But the South Asian monsoon may have the opposite impact for the Thar, located in the dry northwest of the South Asian subcontinent. ...To make the find, reported this month in Earth’s Future, researchers gathered weather data for South Asia over the past 50 years....

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