Where is the Sahara desert located?

Question :

Where is the Sahara desert located? Answer with a detailed explanation.

Subject

Social Science

Standard

Class 8

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2403

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Pari

Knowledge
Answer / Solution

The Sahara Desert is located in Northern Africa. It extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. It is bound by the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlas Mountains in the north and it merges into the Savanna grasslands in the south.

Dashboard
Answer / Solution

The Sahara desert is the world's third-largest desert in Africa. It is situated in the south of the continent of Africa, this country name is is a peninsula, with the Indian Ocean in the east and the Atlantic Ocean in the west.

Its southernmost tip is called 'Cape of good hope'.
This country is a high plateau, whose height has decreased from east to west.
The eastern high is called the 'Drakensberg Mountains'. Its slope is quite sharp and the staircase in the east. It is also the origin of the river 'Wala' and 'Orange'.

The Sahara desert is a desert on the African continent. With an area of arround 9,200,000 square kilometres (3,600,000 sq mi), it is the largest hot desert in the world and the third-largest desert overall, smaller than the deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic only.

The desert comprises much of North Africa, except for the fertile area off the Mediterranean coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It extends from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean Sea 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 surrounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savannas around the Niger River Valley and the Sudan region of sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions, including Western Sahara, the Central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Ar Mountains, the Tenere Desert and the Libyan Desert.

Alexandria
Answer / Solution

The Sahara: Earth's Largest Hot Desert

The name of the desert comes from the Arabic word sahara, which means "desert".

The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, and the third-largest desert behind Antarctica and the Arctic, which are both cold deserts.

The Sahara is one of the harshest environments on Earth, covering 3.6 million square miles (9.4 million square kilometers), nearly a third of the African continent, about the size of the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii).

Geography

The Sahara is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the west, the Red Sea on the east, the Mediterranean Sea on the north, and the Sahel Savannah on the south. The enormous desert spans 11 countries: Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan, and Tunisia.

Sahara Desert

Camels are one of the most iconic animals of the Sahara approximately 500 species of plants, 70 known mammalian species, 90 avian species, and 100 reptilian species that live in the Sahara, plus several species of spiders, scorpions, and other small arthropods, according to World Wildlife Fund.

Many reptile species also thrive in the desert environment, including several species of snakes, lizards, and even crocodiles in places where there is enough water.

Climate

The Sahara alternates from being a dry, inhospitable desert and a lush, green oasis about every 20,000 years, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances in 2019. The study's authors examined marine sediments containing dust deposits from the Sahara for the past 240,000 years. The team found that the cycle between a dry and a green Sahara corresponded to the slight changes in the tilt of Earth's axis, which also drives monsoon activity. When the Earth's axis tilted the Northern Hemisphere just a single degree closer to the sun (about 24.5 degrees instead of today's 23.5 degrees), it received more sunlight, which increased the monsoon rains and therefore, supported a lush green landscape in the Sahara.

The effect of climate change

The area of the Sahara desert has grown nearly 10 percent since 1920, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Climate. While all deserts, including the Sahara, increase in the area during the dry season and decrease during the wet season, human-caused climate change in conjunction with natural climate cycles, are causing the Sahara desert to grow more and shrink less. The study's authors estimated that approximately a third of the desert's expansion was due to human-made climate change.

Aarohi
Answer / Solution

Blanketing much of the northern third of the African Continent, or some 3.5 million square miles, the Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world, extends eastward from the Atlantic Ocean some 3,000 miles to the Nile River and the Red Sea, and southward from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the Mediterranean shores more than 1,000 miles to the savannah called the Sahel. More than 16 times the size of France, the Sahara Desert blankets nearly all of Mauritania, Western Sahara, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Niger; the southern half of Tunisia; and the northern parts of Mali, Chad and Sudan.