The Great Sahara Desert

Sahara, the great desert in the world - is more than 9 million square kilometers of cliffs and sand. Sahara is so huge that covers the most part of North Africa. It is possible to reach Sahara, having gone to the south from any city on the northern coast of Africa, in particular, from Algeria, Tunisia or Aran islands.

Sahara occupies all North of Africa, having stretched on 5149 kilometers from Egypt and Sudan to west banks of Mauritania and Western Sahara. The greatest desert of the world covers the area of 9269594 sq.km.

The word "Sahara" gives rise to images of the infinite, sandy barkhans radiating with heat, too seldom interrupting precious emerald-green oases. But on boundless open spaces of Sahara it is possible to meet practically any kind of a desert landscape; there are also the fruitless rocky plateaus covered with stones, both exotic geological educations and thickets of prickly bushes.



Sahara - the desert arid: in many places here drops out less than 250 mm of a precipitation a year. The main territory of the desert is located in the depth of a land, and dominating winds manage to absorb moisture before it will get into desert heart. The ridges separating the desert from the sea, also compel clouds to spill a rain, without passing them is farther deep into.

As clouds here the rarity, reigns in the desert a ruthless heat in the afternoon. After sunset hot air rises in an upper atmosphere so at night temperature can fall lower than zero. Kebili where temperature rises to 55 °C, - one of the hottest places in the desert not only because of the scorching sun, but also because lies on a way sirocco, a wind arising in burning heart of the desert and driving to the north hot, as if from an oven, air.



The most known areas of Sahara - sandy barkhans where fights for North Africa were conducted during World War II. These huge areas of being rolled sandy waves, up to 100 sq.km., are known as эрги. In places barkhans are extremely mobile and the speed of their movement under the influence of a wind reaches 11 m a year. The oasis of Fadzha lives under persistent threat of constantly approaching waves of vseudushayushchy sand. However in other areas it seems that barkhans stand, without having stirred in the millennia, and hollows between them turned into constant caravan tracks.



As Sahara - the desert arid, its lands were never cultivated, and nomad tribes still wander about it with small herds. In separate oases the diversified agriculture, but the most part of the desert, from the point of view of economic develops, isn't productive. Recently the serious concern causes approach of the desert to the territories adjacent to Sahara. This phenomenon is observed at the wrong choice of agricultural methods that in combination with natural factors, such as the drought and strong winds, and leads to desert approach. Elimination of local vegetation weakens the soil which then is dried up by the sun; the wind carries away it in the form of a dust, and the desert sets in where shoots once rose.