The yellow city: The surreal golden glow over Beijing this morning - caused not by sunrise but by a massive sandstorm covering 16 provincesSandstorms whipped across China today, turning skies a surreal yellow and forcing residents to don masks and scarves to protect themselves from the unhealthy grit.
It was the latest sign of the effects of desertification - overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and drought have expanded deserts in the country's north and west.
The shifting sands have gradually encroached onto populated areas and worsened the sand storms that strike cities, particularly in the spring.
Unusual: A passer-by takes a photograph of the dream-like sceneWinds blowing from the north-west were sweeping sand from the Xinjiang and Ningxia regions, as well as Gansu and Inner Mongolia provinces across China's arid north.
The sand and dust were even carried to parts of southern China.
The noon newscast on state television showed the tourist city of Hangzhou on the eastern coast, where graceful bridges and waterside pagodas were hidden in a mix of sand and other pollution.
In Taiwan, an island 100 miles (160 kilometres) away from the Chinese mainland, drivers complained their cars were covered in a layer of black soot in just 10 minutes.
The Central Meteorological Station urged people to close doors and windows, and cover their faces with masks or scarves when going outside. Sensitive electronic and mechanical equipment should be sealed off, the station said in a warning posted today on its Web site.
'Hazardous': Tourists in Tiananmen Square cover their faces with protective masks against the grit today
Spot the difference: Left, Beijing on a clear day - and right, the same scene todayChina Central Television told viewers to clean out their noses with salt water and remove grit from ears with cotton swabs dipped in alcohol.
It was the second sandstorm to hit Beijing in three days and skyscrapers in the capital were shrouded in a greyish mix of sand, dust and pollution. Residents scurried along sidewalks trying to avoid breathing in the fine particles that can cause chest discomfort and respiratory problems even in healthy people.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing warned that particulate matter in the air made conditions 'hazardous', though high winds dispersed some of the pollution and the air quality was later upgraded to 'very unhealthy'.
Duan Li, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Meteorological Station, said conditions in the city seemed more severe because a sandstorm on Saturday deposited grit on rooftops, sidewalks and trees.
Paramilitary police march through the dust shrouding Tiananmen Square today
A woman covers her face entirely with a scarf against the grit in the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing todayThe winds today carried in even more sand and stirred up what was already there.
Conditions were expected to improve by tonight, with winds blowing the sand toward the south-east.
The worst recent sandstorm to hit Beijing was in 2006, when about 300,000 tons of sand were dumped on the capital.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has estimated that the number of sandstorms has jumped six-fold in the past 50 years to two dozen a year.
As the sandstorm moved southeast, South Korea's national weather agency issued a yellow dust advisory for Seoul and other parts of the country.
The grit did not stop a baseball game from carrying on in Beijing today
Telephone workers repair lines blown down in the raging winds that dumped the sand on the cityChun Youngsin, a researcher at the Korea Meteorological Administration, said the yellow dust was expected to hit the Korean peninsula beginning Saturday afternoon and it would be "the worst yellow dust" this year.
China has planted thousands of acres of vegetation in recent years to stop the spread of deserts in its north and west, but experts have said the work will take decades.
'The challenges ahead are still huge,' China said in a report to the United Nations in 2006.
And the pressures of China's development aren't easing. 'Arid and semiarid areas can only support one or two people per square kilometre.
Olympic Green in Beijing looks as though it has been shrouded in snow - but it is actually sand'In China, population density in these areas is over 10 people per square kilometre,' Jiang Gaoming, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Botany, wrote for the online environmental magazine China Dialogue in 2007.
The residents once were nomads, 'but now they have settled, increasing the pressure on the environment and inevitably damaging it.'
China's dust storms were at their worst in the 1950s and '60s after campaigns to raise farm and factory output following the 1949 communist revolution stripped the soil of vegetation.
Because of those campaigns, archaeologists have found that sandstorms are reducing some packed-earth sections of the Great Wall in western China to 'mounds of dirt' that may disappear in 20 years.
source: dailymail
