Posted on 12/03/2010 4:09:49 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Radar images taken from the space shuttle confirm that a lake broader than Lake Erie once sprawled a few hundred kilometers west of the Nile, researchers report in the December issue of Geology. Since the lake first appeared around 250,000 years ago, it would have ballooned and shrunk until finally petering out around 80,000 years ago...
Since then, desert winds have eroded and sands have buried much of the region's landscape, says Maxine Kleindienst, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto. But during next summer's field season, she and her colleagues will be checking for ancient shorelines at the elevations suggested in the new paper.
Other studies have found evidence of mega-lakes in Chad, Libya and Sudan at various points over the past 250,000 years. The new study targeted Egypt, some 400 kilometers west of the Nile, where in the 1980s researchers reporting finding fish fossils in the desert.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
http://www.metrum.org/mapping/sahara.htm
...Our knowledge of the ancient Sahara was revolutionized by the publication, in 1957, or the results of Henri Lhotes investigations of the rock paintings of the central Sahara. These paintings indicate that there was a time when chariots drawn by horses crossed the Sahara from the Mediterranean coast to the river Niger. This indicates that the process of dissication of the Sahara had reached a point in which transportation by river was no longer possible from the Great Chots to the Ahaggar and from there to the Niger, but the land could still support horses. One principle used by Lhote in dating this chariot route is the fact that the horses are portrayed on the rock painting according to style conventions that occur in Mycenaean art. Lhote assumes that the Mycenaeans, like the Greeks who followed them, had colonized Cyrenaica and that from there had advanced into the Sahara area...
Thanks! That’s a cool image.
Really! LOL.
I have long thought that flooding the Qattara Depression in Egypt would be a great project.
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5641333_qattara-depression.html
I have long thought that flooding the Qattara Depression in Egypt would be a great project.
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5641333_qattara-depression.html
Not only drove ‘em, no doubt they invented ‘em, just as they invented ballet. ;’)
Someone posted a link about this on an old thread I visited yesterday. I remember the billboards for this tourist trap, never visited it though:
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