КАК Саудовская Аравия УКРАЛА ВОДУ У ОКЕАНА?!

Saudi Arabia is a country where more than ninety-five percent of the territory is covered by lifeless desert, rain is almost nonexistent, and there are no full-flowing rivers at all. Yet more than thirty-seven million people live and thrive here. How is that possible? The answer lies hidden beneath layers of scorching sand: thousands of kilometers of steel pipelines that pump billions of liters of water every day from the shores of the Red Sea deep into the mainland. In this video, we will take a detailed look at how one of the most ambitious engineering systems on the planet works. You will learn how giant desalination plants take in salty seawater and turn it into clean drinking water by pushing it through powerful reverse osmosis membranes at a pressure of sixty atmospheres. We will show how steel pipes nearly two meters in diameter are manufactured, how they are transported hundreds of kilometers and welded right in the desert, and then laid into trenches blasted out of rock with explosives. You will see what role pumping stations play, without which the water would not travel even a few dozen kilometers, and why every cubic meter of water here costs around five dollars. We will also honestly discuss the downside of desalination — the salty brine that must be returned to the sea, and the colossal energy costs. This is the story of how an entire nation challenged nature by building an invisible river of steel to turn the salty sea into a source of life in the middle of a scorching desert.