The Times reports on Saudi Arabia’s revolutionary mega city which is being heavily promoted online. It is a spectacular concept which captures the imagination. It is currently being built. A lot of people thought it wouldn’t get this far. It’s going to be 500 m high and 200 m wide. A linear city. It’s designed to run for 170 km across Saudi Arabia in the north-west. It will cost up to £1 trillion. Saudi Arabia has the money.
On either side of this long, linear and very tall continuous building will be reflective glass. And there will be wind turbines to provide power. The mirrored façade on both sides of this amazing structure combined with the wind turbines with allegedly present as a deadly barrier for billions of migrating birds each year and I would stress allegedly it is likely to kill millions perhaps billions of birds annually bearing in mind its enormous size and length.
It is believed that hundreds of bird species will be impacted by this building. Professor William Sutherland, director of research at Cambridge University’s Department of Zoology who led the study on this said that: “Birds flying into tall windows is a problem. It’s also kind of like a mirror so you don’t see it. There is a serious risk that there could be lots of damage to migratory birds.”
It’s a known fact that migrating birds fly into tall buildings at present. Millions are killed annually. It is one of the foremost killers of birds and listed as deadly to birds in a similar way that cats are. Although cats kill more birds than buildings.
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Among the species that use the migratory route that will be crossed by this building are nightingales, wheateaters, larks, turtle doves, and sandgrouse.
Other bird species pass through this area including the Egyptian vulture, and saker falcon. These species enjoy the benefit of an enormous amount of conservation effort and military expenditure. It has transpired that The Line will occupy a “bottleneck” for the 2.1 billion birds that migrate between Europe and Africa every autumn.
This warning about birds being impacted this megacity has been published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The problem has been described as one of the 15 top biological conservation issues on the planet. Other conservation issues concern the oceans and how to use them including making hydrogen from seawater which by the way is a process that is bad news for marine wildlife according to The Times journalist.
