Water gushes through sand dunes after a rare rainfall in the Sahara desert
Water gushes through sand dunes after a rare rainfall in the Sahara desert
A rare deluge of rainfall has left lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara desert. Some regions are seeing more water than they had in decades.
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Good news for any 10,000-year-old hunter-gatherers! It's back, baby!
A green Sahara would be nice. Too bad it took a planet wide catastrophe to see it happen.
the sahara turning fully green could actually be another kind of disaster - parts of the food chain rely on dust from the sahara blowing over the atlantic to provide essential nutrient/minerals for smaller organisms that slightly less small organism feed on.
https://www.popsci.com/environment/sahara-dust-atlantic/
migrating dust clouds originating in the Sahara Desert are crucial to fostering life in the Atlantic Ocean as far away as the Amazonian basin
It's okay, the Amazon will die off from other things first. (/s but only on it being okay)
As far as the human food chain goes, a single round of fertiliser will easily match millennia of windblown desert dust.
It's actually not nice, not for local wildlife, for example. Biomes exist for a reason and if anything changes abruptly, evolution can't keep up with these changes, resulting in extinction of several species. Just like flowers are blooming in Antarctica, a rainy and green Sahara is as beautiful as a rose with thorns under its petals: really beautiful, but ominously dangerous.
Hmm. Given how much it's gone back and forth already, I wonder how much worse it would be this time. It is happening a lot faster.
Serious questions here. The world, by design, has arid zones around the tropics. If we heat up the planet, does that mean deserts pop up in other places? Like, will the Sahara and Cape Town turn green, but Spain and Italy and Argentina turn to desert? And if that’s the case, will hurricanes more often frequent New England, but less frequent Florida? Also, isn’t one of the major reasons we have hurricanes in the first place due to Sahara seeding them? If less desert then…?
Yes.
IIRC in the green Sahara scenarios the arid band moves north into the Mediterranean, and so southern Europe and North Africa get messed up. On other continents, it's already getting noticeably weird and dry where I am on the western great plains.
There's still a lot of uncertainty about whether agriculture, for example, will benefit, worsen or break even due to climate change. Total global precipitation increases, but so does variability both through time and location, and then the heat and the CO2 itself has an effect. It's all very complicated.
Also, isn’t one of the major reasons we have hurricanes in the first place due to Sahara seeding them? If less desert then…?
A good chunk of this current hurricane season just didn't happen, and it was all down to unusual conditions in Africa. On the flip side, each hurricane will be more intense due to hotter seas (which, again, we're probably seeing right now).
There's a pattern here. A different climate isn't bad, per se. It's the rapid change to a different climate. This sort of thing is supposed to take hundreds of thousands of years, not a century or two. As a result we're creating a mass extinction.
I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do know lengthy droughts in certain areas are a likely fallout from climate change, so I'd say that would be a good possibility.
Egypt bout to make a comeback!
Fun fact, it never left. It's been one of the most populous areas all along, and it's still the third most populous country in Africa (after Nigeria and Ethiopia). It's just that it's not the only happening place anymore.