Seen from space, the longest conveyor belt is in Morocco | Hacker News Reader

Seen from space, the longest conveyor belt is in Morocco

en.yabiladi.com

106 pointsjdkee76 comments

In 2007, I did a "buy a car for £100, drive it to Africa" type thing. Best adventure I've ever been on. Western Sahara (where this is) was really interesting - getting out of it and into Mauritania involved driving through a mined no-man's land and having to pay a bribe to the Mauritanian army who manned the checkpoint...

One of the things I saw there was a train that was miles long - we just missed the crossing and had to wait for what seemed like forever. It was full of ore, apparently. There was a brand new road in the country which was paid for by China, apparently in return for mining rights there.

All of this part of the trip was pretty desolate - just sand, rocks and the occasional bush. Drove for literally hours seeing no change whatsoever in the vast landscape.

We did a similar excursion driving from Agadir to Layoune and back. We didn't go too far into Western Sahara because the checkpoints became more frequent and Morocco really didn't want 2 Americans out there. It was memorable, the heat, the cold, desert vegetation, the powerful Atlantic breaking on the dunes and rocks. And finding surfers in the middle of nowhere on these monstrously massive waves.

I will say Western education massively downplays the actual size of Africa with our mercator maps. As an amateur adventurer it was also the first time I felt really unsafe for my family. Our son was a toddler and being that far away from civilization with an old car that could overheat any moment quietly scared the shit out of me.

Regarding how hard it is to get a handle on the actual size of Africa, I’ve found The True Size Of (https://thetruesize.com) immensely helpful.

> I will say Western education massively downplays the actual size of Africa with our mercator maps

IME, Western education just about completely downplays everything about the non-West. Geographical size is just one small facet of this.

I would say nearly all education systems downplays non local history. From my experience most Chinese people don't know much of European history before the 19th century, and most latin Americans know very very little about the two world wars, most Europeans know very little about Asia pre 19th century.

Yes, because in the 15-19th centuries, Europe was busy colonising the rest of the world. This led to an overlap in their histories - something the colonised usually are thoroughly educated about relative to the colonisers. But, in our global zeitgeist, Western culture is quite well known, while other countries' are usually seen through outdated tropes.

> because

How does this connect with the GP? The commenter you’re replying to is suggesting that we should consider the difficulty/limited bandwidth of approaching history for an entirely global perspective, and that there is a universal tendency for people to focus on their local experience.

Full of ore and people! Like you said for a long time there weren't any roads into the interior of Mauritania so that iron train was the main link. I always found it super fascinating - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2016/02/12/h..., https://wildmanlife.com/riding-worlds-longest-iron-ore-train...

Its the subject of this visually stunning 12m film, "This Sahara Railway Is One of the Most Extreme in the World" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEo-ykjmHgg

Thanks for sharing that. That was very interesting.

It almost felt like I was watching a documentary short on Arrakis, where the train is the sandworm.

Thanks, this looks excellent.

I've done this with a 500EUR Citroën ZX! We didn't cross into Mauritania though.

How'd you cope with the heat? It almost did me in, 42 degrees C in a dark green car without AC is pretty much hell. Ten years later and I can't believe we coped that.

You can actually ride that ore train, it was a bit of a fad on YouTube a few years ago, punch in “Mauritania train” and you can find many videos of people riding it.

Where did you start your trip from?

Also, what car did you buy and did you have any breakdowns / maintenance issues ?

Hi. Started from Plymouth, went to Banjul.

Car was an old Skoda Felicia Estate. I gave it a going over before starting the trip, which really meant changing the head gasket (it was blown when I bought it, that's why it was cheap). I made a sump guard out of scrap metal, and aside from some old forest tyres (I had a felicia as a stage rally car at the time too, so had plenty of spares) that was it.

No issues whatsoever over 4400 miles in the car. Didn't miss a beat - one of the reasons I chose the car was because I knew them well.

I did have to convert it to left hand drive before doing the rally, which was interesting - I had some LHD bits (dashboard, steering rack) already, but the wiring was done by re-soldering the RHD loom over to be LHD for the driver (as an LHD loom swap wasn't an option as so much of it was different, it would have been more work doing that).

Also had a fun point where the car had LHD steering wheel, but RHD pedalbox, so it could be driven by two people at the same time. Only moved it up the drive like this as I didn't fancy explaining that to the police / insurance company!

It was this train https://youtu.be/1mL1aI6aabs probably

Phosphorus is essential to life and actually quite rare in Earth’s crust, and probably the bottleneck element to biomass on the planet. It’s a much more critical non renewable resource than oil or strategic minerals but is completely off the radar if most policy makers. Just search for “phosphorus bottleneck”, it makes for sobering reading.

The Office Chérifien des Phosphates, personal property of the King of Morocco, is the world’s largest producer. Occupying Western Sahara costs the Moroccan state more than it brings in taxes, maybe this explains why.

OCP is the Moroccan government's property, not the king's (the king's properties are generally under the Al Mada group). He still has a day in its strategy but he doesn't pocket the money the way he would for Al Mada companies.

Also, most of the ore is not in contested territories. You can look up the sludge pipeline for a more modern take on exporting phosphates that was built 15 years ago, it's not in the Sahara.

The biggest natural resource of contention there is fish, not phosphates. That industry is huge and extractive, and not talked mucb about.

Also the Western Sahara issue is geopolitical more than anything else. If that country were a thing Morocco would be surrounded by Algeria (the separatists are kept alive because of Algeria's support at this point, it's a puppet state of the Algerian military).

And yeah it's an important resource that will become increasingly important as climate change and overpopulation become current issues. Hopefully it doesn't bring the bad juju that other non renewable resources have brought on developing countries

I really hope space mining takes off in my lifetime. The idea of having near unlimited quantities of “rare” earth elements will bring so much coolness to the world.

I think the first trillionaires will be born from mining the Kuiper belt.

Reminds me of the Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_and_Lake_Powell_Rai...), which was a 117 km (73 mi) railway completely isolated from the rest of the US network, built with the sole purpose of shuttling coal from a coal mine to a power station. As a Half-Life fan, I mostly remembered it because of the cool name...

What does "seen from space" mean? I think to have any useful meaning it should mean "Can be seen with the naked eye, from an altitude X which we can consider space such as The Kármán line".

Just that something can be resolved on a satellite image using an arbitrarily large telescope doesn't say much about what size it is.

If the headline writer wanted to precisely convey the size, they would just provide the length in km or whatever. "You can see it from space" is pretty clearly a poetic way to imply something is of the same scale as big geographic features. It's not meant as a way of concisely conveying something's size.

To be fair, your comment was basically the first thing that went through my mind too, but I tried to check my natural urge to correct such things... and now find myself giving a pedantic answer to your comment instead :)

Now that I think about it, it might actually be possible to see from space, indirectly. If it casts a shadow that is really big (e.g. 100m wide) when the sun is low then you could potentially see that, even though you don't see the object directly. The problem I suppose is that just as that happens, you also lose a lot of light.

I guess my second question would then be: to properly see something from space in the not-just-poetic-way-of-describing-something-as-very-big, how large does it need to be?

My interpretation is that can-be-seen-from-space means can be seen with the naked eye from the ISS or something else in low Earth orbit. In this case you will probably not see the actual conveyor belt but different surface colors on both sides of the conveyor belt caused by dust being blown mostly in the predominant wind direction. Looking at it in Google Maps [1] shows that there is a noticeable color change extending between about 100 m and 2000 m to the south west.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/R97QZpBabs9mLh3d6

Rarely do I come across a comment that seems impossible to distinguish from not only my thoughts, but style and pattern as well.

That second paragraph is one of the most relatable things I’ve read on HN in a bit. Cheers :)

It's a pre-internet meme used to convey size.

I for one, can't wait until they report that "It's huge, like the xbox."

It's an idiom that's maybe past its expiration date in the era of "I can see my mailbox from space, if I zoom in on google maps enough"

> According to the US agency[NASA], this belt has «often attracted astronaut attention in this otherwise almost featureless landscape».

I’ve always liked the Tim Traveller video on this: https://youtu.be/67FzgaSWDDw

I really enjoy his channel. He recently did a collaboration with Geoff Marshall who I also very much like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EtBKPcHPrE

Geez, he tries too hard to be cute with his jokes, based on the conveyor belt video. Like a cheap copy of Jay Foreman. At least Jay Foreman's jokes come seemingly naturally and subtly. https://www.youtube.com/c/JayForeman

Maybe so, I like both of them and they each have their own qualities.

It looks like they are starting a megabase. Watch out for the biters, build turrets quick.

Me, I see a slidewalk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slidewalk

Looks like factorio before trains.

Trains are expensive and slow and there is a limit to how long they can get. The conveyor on the other hand can be continuously loaded and you don't need to invest in storage facilities to stock phosphate for when the next train comes.

Belts also don't consume any power whereas you need to keep trains stocked with fuel, though late game this becomes a nonissue if you throw nuclear fuel into them.

Is Australia like Factorio with trains?

Of course not - don't be daft.

Australia doesn't have trains.

Yeah they do

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Road_Train_Austral...

I don’t know if this can be seen from space, but it is easy to see from an airplane 38000’ high. It’s some kind of ore or gas prospection. A giant grid in the middle of the Algerian Sahara. It goes across mainly of a large mesa, but also actoss the small dry creeks and hills around. There is some kind of industrial installation to the west of the grid.

27°17'20.3"N 1°17'19.0"E

https://goo.gl/maps/xbGqQVezPUuNNss1A

Makes me wonder if the Twenty-mule team could have been replaced with a conveyor belt, 165mi according to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team

> Indeed, on its way to Laayoune, wind blows the lighter particles of white ore off the belt.

I was wondering why it didn't have any side-walls. Maybe it's just not cost-effective to try to avoid losing pieces below a certain size.

How is friction overcome in such a long conveyor belt?

You can make a long belt out of two short belts placed end to end: ore falls off the end of one and onto the other. So you build each short belt only as long as can be powered by a reasonably sized motor.

This looks like my first attempt at Factorio.

Almost as long as their cookie popup

What's the maintenance like on that thing?

Factorio vibes

No it is NOT in Morocco. It is in Occupied Western Sahara.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara

The phosphorpus conveypr belt was built illegally, against international law without the consent of the Western Saharewi people.

This is an illegal, brutal, military occupation that has largely been forgotten in Western circles. Please do not normalise it here on HN by calling it Morocco.

Please correct the title.

Fun fact, when I was driving from Morocco into Western Sahara and I had a map on the hood [1] that showed it as a separate country. I had multiple people warn me the Military would get VERY upset about that, and so I cut out that portion of the map. Many people have been detained over the years for having such a map.

The Moroccan military DO NOT want anyone to think of Western Sahara as a separate country.

Last I checked, the UN list it as "occupied territory", but nobody is going to do anything about it because money.

[1] http://static4.theroadchoseme.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03...

The military does not care, nor interfere, nor decide what to do, nor there is a law against having a separated map.

You will probably get looks from people, and have people constantly comment about the map, but I would assume that's normal and doing so about any disputed region would do so. Try it elsewhere and tell me.

Now about Morocco and Sahara, Morocco proposed a referendum since 1991, and still continuously supporting the idea. UN's existence in Sahara is for the purpose of facilitating the referendum. But I will assume it will never happen as long as there is countries to gain diplomatically from keep the issue as a card in their hand. Most of Western Europe flip flop about the issue, depends on how their relationship and interest with Morocco is like. We gonna renegotiate fishing agreements in Moroccan waters? more Sahara talks. A country didn't succeed in barring the EU from importing a competing vegetable? more Sahara talks.

Now about phosphate, most of Moroccan phosphate and especially production exist outside of Sahara.

> We gonna renegotiate fishing agreements in Moroccan waters?

That would also be, "We enjoy our EU trawlers fishing in West Saharan waters, and we don't want find out what a would-be West Saharan government would say about these rights"

I don't get the double standards. Morocco has proposed a referendum, the area is not militarized (only the borders/sand wall but that's like any country with borders).

In the other hand, you have Barcelona where people VOTED to for independence, they got brutalized by the state, and the West and Europe applauded. Basque are in a similar situation too (Allah help them).

Show me any display of violence in Sahara, before you gonna go claim its censored keep in mind that UN's MINURSO has full access to Sahara and they have the RIGHT to monitor the situation.

Some people in Sahara wanna be with Morocco, others don't. Solution is voting, and we are for it. There is no argument for separating a country just because when it was colonized the Sahara part was colonized by Spain while the rest by France.

"Solution is voting, and we are for it."

I applaud that stance, but as far as I know, it does not reflect the stance of your government.

And you are very right, that the same right should apply for the catalans, basque as well as any people felling oppressed and not represented from their government.

It's literally the stance of my government, we literally have a UN sub-org here called MINURSO (The United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara), my government proposed the referendum, my government allowed MINURSO in , my gov protects them, the so called Sahrawi gov are in Algeria and its prominent members spent all their lives working as ambassadors in other countries and they are refusing to have the referendum.

It is a big issue when you talk about something and defend it strongly with no clue.

PS: Morocco in the 60s had many issues in reality, power struggle between the monarchy and parties, 3 army coups that failed, separating in Rif and Sahara by those who fought colonizers and seeing themselves not getting any power. Sahara was an issue like the many other issues, it only lasted because of support by the Eastern Block. Today, in reality, the struggle ended.

You conveniently omit the part about the Moroccan government funding settlement schemes to move Moroccan population to the occupied parts of the Sahara. So now, the majority of the population living there are actually Moroccan settlers, and Morocco wants them to have a vote.

Come on, you shouldn't post such one-sided propaganda in HN.

The Wikipedia entry for MINURSO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Mission_for_the... and the Baker plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_Plan contain relatively neutral accounts.

How did Morocco did that?

There is 2 types of intensives to move to Sahara that exist right now or existed before:

1- Cheaper prices over there, basic necessities are subsidized, gas is way cheaper. This apply to everyone, people who lived there since forever and those who did come from elsewhere. That's normal no?

2- Social welfare, 3 times the grant you'd get as a non-Sahrawi student (while studying in Morocco), and similar advantages for Sahrawi people. This apply only to Sahrawi people, I will compare Western Sahara with Morocco to Chechnya with Russia, it's a net negative on us, costing us so much, but the gov is okay with paying to keep that part of land.

Show me any instance of Israeli-style settlements happening in Sahara. You will only be sent there if you are:

- Teacher, Doctor... but you might be sent anywhere in Morocco its arbitrary.

- Police man, same thing.

- Gendarme, same thing.

- Soldier (you get paid more while in Sahara, understandable considering the potential risks, still soldier hate it cuz it's a fucking hot desert and many leave once they are relocated there)

Other than a public sector job like that, there is no other intensive to go there, basically you go there forced.

I am not spreading propaganda, just sharing my point of view. I do not care about Sahara.

Do we do that for every referendum? Should only native catalonians be able to vote in a referendum for independent Catalonia? Do we let anglo canadians vote living in quebec vote for Québec's independence ? Moving from madrid to Barcelona does not make one a Castillian settler.

Especially considering how historically, migrations from and into the sahara were extremely common. My own family, on the side of my mother is sahraoui (half from what is now western sahara, and the other half from southern morocco) and used to migrate every few years from Mauritania to the Agadir area and vice versa.

Southern moroccan arabic tribes are almost indistinguishable from sahraoui tribes. The line is so blurry much more so than with even between southern and northern moroccans. The language is the same, the customs are very similar, etc.

The concept of an independant and separate western sahara was literally a colonial construct that suited spain very well. It would've probably died off if Algeria didn't prop up (what was an irrelevant fringe group like Polisario) to destabilize it's regional rival.

I don't think Catalonia is directly comparable. It's not occupied territory, it's a region/nation that wants to go their own way. Not even the staunchest Catalan separatists defend a referendum where immigrants that arrive from elsewhere in Spain cannot vote. But coming from an invasion makes things rather different.

That said, yeah, of course things are not that simple. Some of the people I'm calling settlers have been in Western Sahara for over 40 years, they may have children of voting age who were born there. Why wouldn't they vote in a referendum about the place that they call home, and where they even may have lived for their whole life? So it's not as easy as saying that the Moroccan government is wrong and the Polisario is right.

But the GP painted a picture where Morocco is pro-referendum and Western Sahara won't have it, and that's clearly one-sided propaganda. Morocco wants a referendum under their conditions, and Western Sahara under theirs. Morocco has rejected UN-endorsed proposals of referendums, even proposals where Moroccan migrants/settlers would vote as well (see Baker Plan II in the links I posted, or elsewhere, of course). And all of this is in the context that started with the Green March, an invasion condemned by the UN that was made by Morocco, among other reasons... to prevent a referendum.

So yeah, you of course have some valid points, but the GP's message is clearly propaganda.

I agree that morocco would never really let WS become independant and would only let a referundum happen if it is sure to win it. So I think you are totally right on that.

"It is a big issue when you talk about something and defend it strongly with no clue."

Well, I have been to the western sahara and informed myself on the topic over the years so maybe I am not totally clueless, but rather have an unbiased view, as I have no ties with either side? But sure, I do not claim to be an expert, or what the best solution is. But I really do not see your government going for a fair solution, but rather cement the "facts on the ground".

You just claimed there is no referendum proposition.

Referendum is literally supporting Morocco, Spain lately said they support the referendum in Sahara, our gov thanked them, our media celebrating that Spain is in our side now.

I don't know what's the best solution either, and I would be okay with Sahara being independent as long as people vote for that.

It is recognized by the united states as morocco. The rest of your comment is basic polisario propaganda, and does not reflect the reality on the ground. There's nothing "left" to normalize and there is no reason to give any credibility to a foreign backed separatist group that has basically done nothing for the Sahraoui people. A part from betraying it by waging a proxy war benefitting only it's algerian puppet masters, while holding it's own people hostage in Tindouf.

The US only recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in 2020, in exchange for Moroccan normalisation of relations with Israel. The fact that the US recognises it is pretty meaningless, since it was clearly just used as a bargaining chip.

"The United Nations considers the Polisario Front to be the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, and maintains that the Sahrawis have a right to self-determination."

Doesn't mean much when so many countries in the world regularly codify the violation of multiple "human rights" supposedly agreed by the UN.

Even UN doesn't recognize it as country, heck even Palestine has way way higher status.

Did you read the wikipedia article or just fishing for upvotes?

Can you explain why the so called polisario has a strogner claim over western sahara versus morocco?

Do you know anything about Moroccan history and territory before the colonial interference of the Spanish and French?

You seem to be more educated in this area, please share your knowledge and link to some reading material instead of asking questions like it's a pop quiz in high school that nobody expected or actually studied for.

Google maps - https://goo.gl/maps/EBKN4Xu8JXeBfBJM7

Thanks!

Anything can be seen from space under right weather, can we stop with these clickbaity headlines?

Or do they actually mean Seen from space with naked eye? But it again comes down to definition where exactly in space.

Maybe read the article?

Or just look at the pictures.

Yes, I can see there some satelite photo taken by camera, maybe I'm old but when I was young they didn't teach us to fly into space with our arms and I have still regular outdated natural eyes. But maybe your satelitte technology camera naked eye see things as pictured.

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