The largest desert in the world, the Sahara Desert , has stories and legends about it all over the world. Even people who have never been there will be shocked by its vast sandy land and desolate scene.

desolate sahara desert

Just a small oasis can bring hope to those who are lost here, but the Berbers who have lived here for generations have always found water in their unique way.

If you want to dig water here, how deep do you need to dig into the sand to see the water?

In fact, it is very difficult to obtain water here. If you do not find the right location, no water will appear even if you dig tens of meters .

By the way, the deepest sand here reaches 180 meters . Although it is not as deep as the sea, it is enough to submerge a city at such a depth.

Berbers in the desert

What will happen if you keep digging down in the Sahara Desert, or even dig out all the sand here? What will we see at the bottom? Where does the water in the Sahara Desert come from? How did it become a sandy place?

This article will reveal these answers one by one from various studies in the Sahara Desert.

ancient river in the desert

The Sahara Desert is mainly composed of rocky Hamada and sandy land. Many sand dunes are more than 180 meters high, and the average height is about 150 meters .

From Algeria, Chad, and Egypt to Niger, Western Sahara and most other areas, the desert area of ​​9 million square kilometers makes it the largest desert area on earth .

Sahara Desert

However, the Sahara is not all a desolate area, where no grass grows. The driest area is in the central Sahara, to the northern and southern parts of the desert, including the highlands, where there are relatively sparse grasslands and desert shrubs, as well as tall shrubs. There are more gatherings here.

To the south, on the Sahel border of the Sahara Desert, there is a dry savannah with a lot of precipitation during the summer rainy season.

In addition, there are several important cities around the site, such as Mauritania .

It can be seen that even the most inhospitable places in the world are not completely devoid of life.

mauritania

Going back to the question mentioned in the article, what will you see if you dig the sand all the way to the bottom?

There may be a lot of oil and gas resources in such a vast sandy land, but will there be if the desert is completely dug up? In fact, the opposite is true. Beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert are riverbeds and ancient lakes .

According to NASA's aircraft radar topographic scans, there are traces of a prehistoric lake under the Sahara Desert.

Geologists see images of bedrock using wind-blown sediments, sediments created by running water, and with the help of radar.

The Sahara hides a huge prehistoric lake

Using a combination of data from space shuttle topographic survey scans and ground samples, geologists estimate that the Nile once flooded the Kiseba depression in Egypt , where it formed a huge lake.

Scientists speculate that the ancient river valleys and riverbeds at the bottom of the desert were formed 250,000 years ago. When the Nile River passed through this place, it submerged the Eastern Sahara and formed a huge lake of 42,000 square kilometers.

These buried paleochannels were periodically activated as river systems during climate warming cycles, and recent algorithmic analysis shows it ended 6,500 years ago, the team said.

Armed with this data, the team conducted further investigations, and they estimated that the river stretched more than 520 kilometers beneath the desert.

The Nile River flowing through the Sahara Desert

This may have something to do with a larger ancient water system known as the Tamanrasset Valley .

These rivers may have been caused by climate change and the movement of the land plate in the past, causing the land to gradually sink and be buried in the sand later.

Scientists believe that if the river system wants to resume operation, it may have to wait until the next African tide period without any impact .

With the current increase in greenhouse gases and the disorder of the global climate system, it may be necessary to wait until the climate model is fully established to fully analyze the river system.

Sahara Desert

At present, there is mainly a lack of surface feature connections between ocean systems and continents, and it is difficult to use existing desert models to establish such connections.

It is really surprising that there is a huge river system at the bottom of the Sahara Desert. How did it form?

desert cycle

In fact, the Sahara Desert was not what it is now. Over the past few million years, solar activity and climate change have promoted the dynamic and periodic wet events of the North African monsoon, which made the Sahara Desert an oasis in the past . In addition, there are Grassland expansion.

The so-called African wet period is the result of a marked shift in the hydrological cycle in North Africa and an enhanced northward migration of the African summer monsoon due to increased insolation and tropical radiation.

The Sahara Once an Oasis

The position of the rain bands formed by this influence led to the development of river networks in the Sahara, which increased the delivery of fresh water to the surrounding ocean.

During this period, lakes, rivers, wetlands and vegetation covered the Sahara and Sahel and created a completely green Sahara.

Archaeological evidence suggests that diatoms, mammals, and reptiles lived here, while organic-rich mudstone, evaporite, and limestone were deposited in an underground river system.

The discovery of an underground river system in the Sahara also allowed scientists to trace river deposits back 120,000 years .

The deposits were found on the seabed at the western end of the Sahara, but there are no rivers flowing into the Atlantic on the western side of the Sahara today.

The French research team later believed that between 11,700 and 5,000 years ago, the periodic wetting of the Sahara Desert gave birth to the river .

It can be seen that the wet period in Africa had a great impact on the Sahara Desert.

Current research believes that this periodic event takes 20,000 years as a cycle, and the latest one ended 5,000 to 6,000 years ago , which is the part mentioned above.

Also, during the last Ice Age , the Sahara was much larger than it is today, stretching south beyond its present borders.

In 8000 BC, after the collapse of the northern ice sheet disappeared, the northern part of the Sahara Desert dried up.

This trend was initially offset by the influence of the monsoons, but by 4200 BC, the monsoons retreated southward to where they are today, leading to the Sahara region becoming what it is today.

This also explains why there are many murals on the rock walls of the Sahara Desert, and there are traces of human life in many places.

As early as thousands of years ago, that is, after the end of the Ice Age, humans lived in the Sahara for a while when they migrated here.

Many murals and rock art can even be traced back to 10,000 years ago. There are more than 30,000 murals related to river animals. At the same time, many dinosaur fossils have been discovered here.

Murals in the Sahara Desert

Nubia, Egyptian civilization, and Greek civilization were all beneficiaries of the Sahara Desert, and the trade economy and culture developed by these ancient empires extended to all parts of the world.

Including the Berbers we are familiar with today, they are now the guardians of the Sahara Desert. If travelers lost in the desert had not been rescued by them, they might have been buried in the sand long ago.

Is it possible for an oasis to appear in the Sahara Desert today?

oasis expectations

It can be seen that the Sahara Desert can be understood as a cyclical event. We mentioned earlier that global warming will bring uncertain effects to this cyclical change in the future. This change in the future Sahara may be permanent. of.

global warming

Global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Climate Commission indicate that global warming may lead to increased precipitation in large parts of East Africa, parts of West Africa, and Central Africa, especially in West Africa .

The Sahel is getting greener, but overall precipitation hasn't quite returned to mid-20th-century levels.

To a large extent, this change is due to people's greening projects. Although the precipitation brought about by the increase in heat has increased, from another perspective, the survival time of plants will be shorter .

Only by increasing the area of ​​greening and irrigation to promote vegetation growth can this state be maintained for a long time.

West Africa's Sahel, captured by satellite, is turning green

It's hard to imagine that such a deserted area would have such an amazing history in the past, and the Sahara isn't quite as lifeless as it's been described. On the contrary, the life and civilization that once appeared here have influenced the whole world invisibly.