Sahara Desert

Imagine a place on Earth that gets so hot that you could only go without water for four hours. Pretty scary, uh?

That is Africa’s Sahara desert the world’s  largest desert if you don’t include the cold deserts of  Antarctica and the Arctic. Its parched, forbidding landscape took shape over thousands of years, but even today, the Sahara is constantly changing.
For centuries caravaneers have traveled through the Sahara desert. Even though there are many oases in the Sahara, the desert is so immense that travelers may go for days to reach them.

Oases make trade possible between the ports of North Africa and savanna markets further south. Without these wet rest stops for humans and animals, crossing the desert would be almost impossible.

As the world’s biggest desert, the Sahara covers a third of the African continent-an area about the size of the United States and runs through 11 countries and a part of Africa known as Western Sahara.

The Sahara’s boundaries are the Atlantic Ocean on the west, the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea on the north, the Red Sea and Egypt on the east, and the Sudan and the valley of the Niger River on the south. The Sahara is divided into western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Aïr Mountains (a region of desert mountains and high plateaus), Tenere desert and the Libyan desert (the most arid region). The highest peak in the Sahara is Emi Koussi (3,415 m/11,200 ft) in the Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad.

The Sahara divides the continent of Africa into North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The southern border of the Sahara is marked by a band of semiarid savanna called the Sahel; south of the Sahel lies the lusher Sudan and the Congo River Basin. Most of the Sahara consists of rocky hamada; ergs (large sand dunes) form only a minor part.

People lived on the edge of the desert thousands of years ago since the last ice age. The Sahara was then a much wetter place than it is today. Over 30,000 petroglyphs of river animals such as crocodiles  survive, with half found in the Tassili n’Ajjer in southeast Algeria.