This Huge Desert in Asia Has Turned Nearly 40% Greener — but Experts Say There’s a Downside to It

Spread across northwest India as an expansive stretch of 77,000 square miles, the Thar Desert is one of the major hot deserts of the world with the highest population density, according to the BBC. Also known as the Great Indian Desert, it is punctuated with windmills that churn out copious amounts of electricity. Quarries of feldspar, phospherite, gypsum, kaolin, limestone, and marble dotted throughout the desert are dug and mined by engineers to scour materials for gardening fertilizers and cement that glues up their towering buildings in urban cities.

The first reason that was revealed was the significant increase in the monsoon precipitation between 2001 and 2003. 64% to be precise. “The increased rainfall during the monsoon season is the primary driver of greening, while non-monsoon season greening is mainly attributed to groundwater pumping,” researchers noted in the study. "Increased water and energy availability have led to expansion in agricultural and urban areas with a considerable increase in crop yields in the region," study co-author Vimal Mishra, a civil engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, told Live Science, adding that, "There is no other desert in the world that has experienced increases in urbanization, agriculture, and precipitation during the recent period.”

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