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Rehabilitating the dessert with ground water aquifer reserves, how it happened.

Climate tipping points are much more fantasy than science Sahara has been shrinking over the past decades. Image: NASA Dr. Kröpelin is an award-wining geologist and climate researcher at the University of Cologne and specializes in studying the eastern Sahara desert and its climatic history. He’s been active out in the field there for more than 40 years. In the Auf 1 interview, Dr. Kröpelin contradicts the alarmist claims of growing deserts and rapidly approaching climate tipping points. He says that already in the late 1980s rains had begun spreading into northern Sudan and have since indeed developed into a...

A massive Sahara Desert dust cloud is drifting 5,000 miles over the Atlantic towards the US - and experts have warned it could bring extreme heat while impacting air quality in five southeastern states.Skies over Florida, along with southern swathes of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, will look 'a little hazy' and could turn brown from the sandy plume as it lingers over the weekend. Along with haze, the desert dust will catalyze scorching temperatures of around 105 degrees in the Sunshine State and an uptick in allergies - but it will also bring brighter sunsets and suppress tropical thunderstorms,...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

JUST months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated. Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years. Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took...

researchers into the Garamantes -- a "lost" Saharan civilisation that flourished long before the Islamic era -- are hoping that Libya's new government can restore the warrior culture, mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories, to its rightful place in Libya's history. For while the impressive Roman ruins at Sabratha and Leptis Magna -- both world heritage sites -- are rightly famous, Libya's other cultural heritage, one that coexisted with its Roman settlers, has been largely forgotten. It has been prompted by new research -- including through the use of satellite imaging -- which suggests that the Garamantes built more extensively...

The absence of monsoon rains at the source of the Nile was the cause of migrations and the demise of entire settlements in the late Roman province of Egypt...The oasis-like Faiyum region, roughly 130 km south-west of Cairo, was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Yet at the end of the third century CE, numerous formerly thriving settlements there declined and were ultimately abandoned by their inhabitants. Previous excavations and contemporary papyri have shown that problems with field irrigation were the cause. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the dryness and desertification of the farmland - for example, by...

Extinct Ancient Societies Gaunches of the Canary IslandsAbout the Gaunches of the Canary Islands, history of the extinct society, how they were destroyed and the last of them. Their Society: Inhabiting the Canary Islands, which lie off the coast of northwest Africa in the Atlantic Ocean, the Guanches were a tall, fair or red-haired race of people. It is believed that they were the descendants of Cro-Magnon men who migrated to the islands from southern France and the Iberian Peninsula in oceangoing canoes some 3,000 years ago. The Guanches' own oral history and mythology spoke of 60 men and their...

A massive plume of dust referred to as a Saharan Air Layer (SAL) could reach U.S. Gulf Coast states this weekend, according to AccuWeather. On Tuesday, weather models show SAL traversing the Atlantic. The expectation is this enormous plume of dust will sweep across the Caribbean and into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of this week, reaching the U.S. Gulf Coast by Saturday. “A large batch of dust was evident on satellite photos from the start of this week and was beginning to enter the Caribbean. “It is possible, but not a certainty, that this dust will make...

The lush green Sahara by Mike Oard Posted 9-20-2021 The Sahara Desert of northern Africa is one of the driest and hottest locations on Earth (figure 1). In the eastern Sahara, it rains only once every 30 to 50 years. The Sahara Desert covers about 9,200,000 km2 (3,600,000 sq mi), comparable to the size of the entire USA. It is divided into several regions, sometimes by high mountain ranges such as the Ahaggar and Tibesti Mountains (figure 2). Some 74% of the Sahara is covered by sand, with several large ‘sand seas’, such as the Great Sand Sea of eastern...

Ten days ago, NASA’s satellite spotted a massive dust storm blowing off the Sahara Desert and into the waters of the Atlantic Basin. At the time, we forecasted dust clouds were “headed for the Americas.” Fast forward today, millions of tons of Sahara’s nutrient-laden minerals have been whisked across the Atlantic Ocean and are set to arrive in South Florida on Friday or Saturday. Satellite footage shows the airborne dust particles have already blanketed parts of the Caribbean. #SaharanDust has been on the move across the Atlantic for the past few weeks. So far, no clouds thick enough to make...

TALLAHASSEE, FL - Sunsets across Florida in the coming days could become even more spectacular, as clouds of dust from the Sahara desert sweep in across the Atlantic coast. The plume is expected to dampen storm activity but worsen air pollution, causing trouble for some people with allergies and other respiratory problems. Some health experts say symptoms could mimic those from COVID-19. NASA is monitoring the dust, which was swept off Africa by strong winds swirling across the deserts of Mali and Mauritania. Trade winds are carrying the plume across the ocean, with the leading edge expected to arrive in...

An ancient, meteorite, or achondrite, was discovered in the Sahara desert last year that has now been identified as chunk from a protoplanet that formed before Earth came into existence. The space rock, named EC 002, dates back 4.6 billion years and consists mostly of volcanic rock, leading experts to believe it came from the crust of a very early planet.... ...no asteroid shares the spectral features of EC 002, indicating that almost all of these bodies have disappeared, either because they went on to form the building blocks of larger bodies or planets or were simply destroyed.'

A large Saharan dust plume is moving NE over parts of Europe -- from Spain and France today, February 6, 2021, into Italy, Germany, and the rest of northern and eastern Europe and the Balkans in the coming days. Sand-laden rains, a fairly rare phenomenon in winter, are expected over much of the region. Events such as this can significantly lower air quality and be dangerous for sensitive groups -- be sure to track your local air quality index.

Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming. Recently, more detailed insights were gained from a combination of sediment cores extracted from the Mediterranean Sea and results from climate computer modeling, which an international research team, including University of Hawai'i at Mānoa oceanography researcher Tobias Friedrich, examined for the first time. The layers of the seafloor tell the story of major environmental changes in North Africa over the past 160,000 years. Analyzing such sediments would help to better...

In the Sahara Desert of northwestern Algeria, just outside the town of Ain Sefra, sand dunes were streaked with ice crystals as far as the eye could see. Ain Sefra sits about 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) above sea level and is surrounded by the Atlas Mountains, near the Algerian-Moroccan border. While summer temperatures in the region regularly soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), January days average a much milder 57 F (14 C), according to Sky News. Tuesday's ethereal display of frost followed a rare night of 27-F (minus 3 C) temperatures. Snow and ice accumulation in the...

French military forces fighting Islamic extremists in West Africa killed more than 50 jihadists and detained four in an operation last week in Mali, French officials said. Defense Minister Florence Parly tweeted Monday night that the French force in the region also confiscated weapons and equipment from the fighters in the operation last Friday, which she said “shows once again that terrorist groups cannot act with impunity.” Drones monitoring the region in northern Mali spotted a convoy of suspected fighters on motorcycles, prompting France to launch the operation, first with airstrikes and then with a ground operation by French commandos,...

ISLAMIC State is taking over swathes of Africa like it did in Syria and Iraq with "staggeringly brutal" tactics, the Pentagon has warned. According to a report from West Point, the US officer training academy, the group's expansion and regrouping on the continent shows "Islamic State is far from defeated". "By the summer of 2020, it had become resolutely clear that the Islamic State was a changed organisation, but by no means a beaten one," the report, published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre, said. The Pentagon report said there has been a "marked upward curve of claimed cumulative attacks...

Physical evidence found in caves in Laos helps tell a story about a connection between the end of the Green Sahara, when once heavily vegetated Northern Africa became a hyper-arid landscape, and a previously unknown megadrought that crippled Southeast Asia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, University of Pennsylvania, William Paterson University of New Jersey, and other international institutions explain how this major climate transformation led to a shift in human settlement patterns in Southeast Asia, which is now inhabited by more than 600 million people... To...

The ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids may have been able to move massive stone blocks across the desert by wetting the sand in front of a contraption built to pull the heavy objects, according to a new study. Physicists at the University of Amsterdam investigated the forces needed to pull weighty objects on a giant sled over desert sand, and discovered that dampening the sand in front of the primitive device reduces friction on the sled, making it easier to operate. The findings help answer one of the most enduring historical mysteries: how the Egyptians were able to accomplish...