TARGET 121226

The Longest Conveyor Belt
In The World

The Bou Craa conveyor belt running through the arid
Western Saharan terrain.

The longest conveyor belt in the world runs 61 miles
from the hostile interior of Moroccan occupied Western
Sahara to the port city of El-Aaiun. Open to gusty
desert winds in many places, the belt's precious white
cargo is strewn across the dusty brown desert, marking
the Earth so profoundly that this massive machine's
outline can be seen from space.



Between around 100 and 55 million years ago, marine
waters of the nascent and ever-widening Atlantic Ocean
transgressed and regressed over this now dry land. These
waters deposited thick muddy sediments containing the
decaying tissue, bones, shells, and excrement of
dead marine life that had collected and concentrated
on the ocean floor over millions of years. As a
result, this thick oozing mud, a complex melange of
fetid material, was rich in phosphorus.

Without phosphorus, life itself is not possible.
It exists in all living things in cells, in bones,
indeed, even in DNA. For that reason, the mud that formed
the hills of Western Sahara so many millions of years ago
were full of phosphorus. Now, millions of years later, it
is that same phosphorus that we extract from the Earth and
load onto a conveyor belt.



The white powder that travels along this belt is phosphate.
Phosphate, a mineral containing one phosphorus atom and four
oxygen atoms, is one of the primary components of agricultural
fertilizer. Unlike its counterpart, nitrate, phosphate cannot be
synthesized. It forms only in rocks. The only way to get at
is to mine it. It is a finite resource, and it is one that
our world has come to depend on mightily.

This dependence began between the 1940s and the 1970s, when
technological and agricultural advances allowed millions who
would have otherwise starved to be fed. Known as the Green
Revolution, these advances consisted of the improvement
of irrigation systems, the development of high-yield cereal
crops and most important, the widespread use of synthetic fertilizer.



Bags of fertilizer.

The component in fertilizer that is commonly assumed to
have made the Green Revolution a reality is nitrogen. In
1909, Fritz Haber developed what later became known as
the Haber-Bosch process, which made it possible to
convert atmospheric nitrogen to a form that could be applied
to crops. Its use in agriculture became central when Norman
Borlaug, dubbed the father of the Green Revolution, began
to advocate its application in the developing world.

But because nitrogen cannot act alone, its increase in fertilizer
use spurred another, quieter revolution - a massive growth in
the amount of phosphate rock mined for use in fertilizer.
Life requires - among other things - both nitrogen and
phosphorus. These two elements are the two nutrients that most
often limit the growth and expansion of life.



Morocco (and with it Western Sahara), with its massive deposits coupled
with minimal domestic needs, is the world's largest exporter of
phosphate. Indeed, much of our world's food security is tied
up in the production of phosphorus from the desolate
desert regions of Western Sahara and Morocco, two regions whose
boundaries remain contested to this day. This political instability
should be cause for some concern - the world's food supply
depends on a steady flow of phosphate from this region.

During a worldwide food crisis in 2007 and 2008, the Moroccans
repeatedly increased the price of phosphate, blaming the increase
on high energy and shipping costs, as well as reduced industry stocks
of phosphate. By raising the price on their exports, they drove the
rest of the market to increase prices as well.



As a consequence of this and other factors, much of the developing
world suffered staggering levels of starvation as price of food
rose. Food riots broke out in at least 40 different countries.
Thousands of workers rioted in Bangladesh. The prime minister
of Haiti was overthrown, largely as the result of food shortages,
and in Pakistan, the Pakistani army was deployed to guard food stockpiles.

Beyond political complications, there are other reasons for
concern. Most obvious is the fact that phosphate is a finite
resource, one that we will run out of someday. When that day
comes is a hotly contested academic debate (the safe
money seems to be on 300 years), but there is no denying the
fact that it is going to run out and that there is no
biochemical replacement for it.



The end of the line: the conveyor belt stretches into
the Atlantic Ocean in El Aaiun.

It's a precarious situation, but there are potential solutions.
We need to be more judicious with our use of fertilizer - much of
the phosphate we add to crops washes away without ever serving
a biological role. We also waste many opportunities to recycle
the phosphorus we do use back onto crops. Scientists are working
on ways to reclaim phosphorus from human and animal waste, just as
they are working on ways to make farmlands hold on to their
phosphorus more efficiently. These two ends of the equation
will help make the agricultural phosphorus cycle a closed loop - the
way it is in the natural world.

But we are far from reaching that goal now. There seems to me to be
no more potent a symbol of the fragility of our current system
than the razor thin outline of a massive conveyor belt bleeding white
across the brown arid desert of a poltically contested land. Viewed
from space, it looks almost meaningless. But the world literally depends on
its constant supply of phosphate. With only a bit of hyperbole, one
could say this massive machine is what is feeding the billions of
humans who inhabit this planet.



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If you got impressions for which this feedback is insufficient, more information,
pictures and videos can be found at the following web sites:

The Sieve website
Amusing Planet website
Wikipedia - Boa Craa
Google Sightseeing
Gizmodo

Many thanks to Ray McClure for creating this target.