ABSTRACT

As regards the Yellow River the silt masses prevent the engineers from regulating effectually the river so that the flood flow can be carried to sea without dike breaches and their accompanying terrible inundations. The main difficulty is that the river engineers are fighting an exceedingly rapid geological land-transformation process. Nowhere else is such a gigantic movement of land masses taking place. The farmers in the Northwest are heroically trying to stem the progress of this erosion. They have terraced the land and in many places tried to check the back cutting of the gullies by providing definite places where the accumulated surface runoff can pass downhill with the least damage. When one realizes that surface and gully erosion is the sole cause of all the terrible misery which the Yellow River brings to the densely populated plain then the soil erosion problem becomes one of first-class national importance.