The Sahara Desert

The Sahara is the biggest desert in the world . The landscape is made up of  mountain ranges, rocky plateaus  and sandy plains called ergs. The Nile is the only river that carries water all year long. It flows through the Sahara in Sudan and Egypt.  

The desert reaches from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east –over 3,500 km. The highest peaks  are in the Tibesti   mountains . They reach a height of about 3,500 metres. There are about 90 bigger oases in the Sahara, where water comes up from underground rivers or wells. People here live in small villages and grow crops. 

The Sahara  also has important raw materials. Oil and gas lie under the Algerian and Libyan desert. There are also other minerals ,like  copper and iron ore. 

About 2 million people live in the desert. Most of them are Arabs or Berbers. The Tuareg are a tribe that live in the mountainous areas of the central Sahara. Most of them are nomads who raise sheep , goats or camels and travel around all year.  

In oases  people can live the whole year. They grow dates, wheat and other crops. But, they must also fight against sand storms and wandering dunes that threaten to cover the oases with sand.  

The Sahara was not always a desert. During the Ice Age , when many parts of the world were covered with snow and ice, northern Africa had a much wetter climate. The Sahara had many lakes and rivers  and elephants and giraffes lived in the grasslands and forests.  At about 5000 BC the climate started to become drier and the Sahara turned into a desert.  Many people moved south .  

Today the desert is growing because people destroy fertile land. They raise too many animals that eat all the grass or they cut down trees that still exist.

#

Satellite image of the Sahara desert
Image: NASA, Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons

Sand dunes in the Algerian desert
Image:Fiontain, CC BY-SA 4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons