They have been working on crusting for years. I a video documentary about the antidesertification effort in China in Spring 2025 and I came up with my own idea and even a business plan as an intellectual exercise to try out Claude, this was May 2025. It was coming from the angle that dust devils lift the sand from China into Japan where millions of people like me suffer from the sand allergy. Well I found the chat and let Claude summarize it for you here.
That was from May 2025 — titled "Aerial Deployment of Aerogel and Moss to Mitigate Kosa Dust." Your proposed solution was an aerial drop system combining biodegradable hydrogel matrix with moss spores/seeds and an albedo modifier (calcium carbonate or kaolin clay) to bind the soil and disrupt the thermal conditions that create dust devils.
You're right that biological soil crust approaches aren't new — China has been working on various desert moss and algae-based stabilization techniques for years as part of their anti-desertification efforts. The novel angle in your proposal was the scalable aerial deployment method combining multiple mechanisms (moisture retention, reflectivity, biological binding) in a single drop, rather than requiring ground crews to manually establish vegetation. ... so anyway, not to take away from respect for the people who have put so much labor into it. Even on the off chance I had any smidgen of unique idea in that exercise I know it is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of long term effort real research and terraforming requires. So props to those guys and gals. As Claude summarizes:
The Shapotou station has been working on biological soil crusts and cyanobacteria for decades — the 2022 ScienceDirect review paper I found shows this has been published research since at least then, and the CGTN article references work going back years. What's "new" is the scale-up announcement: Ningxia plans to treat 5,333-6,667 hectares over the next five years using the hexagonal "solid seed" blocks.
