12 Nov 2024        12:37:46 pm

Geography

Sahara desert

Tags : Sahara desert

Topic: Landforms

Why in the news?

• Sahara desert witnesses first floods in 50 years. A rare deluge of rainfall has left lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara desert.

Source: Down To Earth

About Sahara desert:

• It is a desert spanning across North Africa, excluding the fertile region on Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan.
• It covers an area of 9,200,000 sq. km., 31% of the African continent.
• It is the largest hot desert in the world and the third-largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Arctic.
• It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan region of sub-Saharan Africa. 
• It is divided into several regions, i.e. 
  • Western Sahara
  • Ahaggar Mountains
  • Tibesti Mountains
  • Aïr Mountains
  • Ténéré desert
  • Libyan Desert
• It covers large parts of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Western Sahara and Sudan, and parts of southern Morocco and Tunisia. 

0 Comments