China is preparing to increase the amount of artificial precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau – and for this it is going to conduct an experiment to create the most powerful artificial rain in the history of the humanity. According to a preliminary report, the project envisages the installation of tens of thousands of flare units all over the territory of Tibet, whose work will cause an increase in annual rainfall of 10 billion cubic meters per year. This is what the practical implementation of the plan named “Tianhe”, or “Heavenly River”, developed back in 2016 at Tsinghua University with the aim of watering the region’s 1.6 million square kilometres, will look like.
It is assumed that the flare installations of the “Tibetan project will emit particles of silver iodide upward into the atmosphere, which the wind will then spread to the clouds and thereby cause precipitation. To date, more than five hundred such devices have been installed on the mountain slopes in Tibet, Xinjiang and some other regions, “one of the researchers quotes the South China Morning Post”. And the data of trial operation already looks promising.
Yet it is not known when the experiment will be completed, but considering scale of the idea, as well as the ambiguity of the statement about the “universal good – no doubt we hear about this not for the last time.