• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Sahara Transforms Into A Lush And Green Land Every 21,000 Years

September 20, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

It may feel like the sand dunes and rocky plateaus of the Sahara Desert are as old as time, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. As shown by a new study, this vast strip of North Africa flips from arid desert to lush green woodland every 21,000 years or so.

The last period in which the Sahara was a green woodland occurred between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago. This latest research affirms that this was not just an odd blip, but part of a cyclic transformation that changed the area from arid to humid roughly every 21,000 years. 

Advertisement

“The cyclic transformation of the Sahara Desert into savannah and woodland ecosystems is one of the most remarkable environmental changes on the planet,” Dr Edward Armstrong, lead study author and a climate scientist at the University of Helsinki and University of Bristol, said in a statement.

“Our study is one of the first climate modelling studies to simulate the African Humid Periods with comparable magnitude to what the palaeoclimate observations indicate, revealing why and when these events occurred.”

The new research looked to better understand the so-called “North African Humid Periods” over the course of the last 800,000 years using a recently developed climate model.

Their work affirmed the idea that the periodic wet phases in the Sahara were driven by changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun. It’s generally agreed that the “greening” of the Sahara is caused by Earth wobbling on its axis, impacting the seasonality and determining the amount of energy received by this part of the planet. This ultimately affects the strength of the African Monsoon, which helps control how much vegetation spreads across this vast region.

Advertisement

However, their workings also suggest that this cycle might be influenced by the distant high-latitude ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. Their work notes that the humid periods did not occur during the Ice Ages when much of the Earth’s high latitudes were caked in thick glacial ice sheets.

They speculate that these ice sheets helped to cool down the atmosphere like a refrigerator, limiting the African Monsoon system and suppressing the growth of plant life in the Sahara Desert.

The cyclical transformation of North Africa isn’t just a big deal for the Sahara, it also has huge implications for our own story. After all, some of humans’ biggest early feats – the migrations out of Africa – were largely dictated by the condition of the Sahara. Depending on its “mood”, it could either act as a harsh hurdle or a welcoming pathway. 

“The Sahara region is kind of a gate controlling the dispersal of species between both North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent,” explained Miikka Tallavaara, co-author and Assistant Professor of Hominin Environments at the University of Helsinki.

Advertisement

“The gate was open when Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. This alternation of humid and arid phases had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species in Africa. Our ability to model North African Humid periods is a major achievement and means we are now also better able to model human distributions and understand the evolution of our genus in Africa,” continued Tallavaara.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Analysis-Diverse boards to pick the next Boston and Dallas Fed bank chiefs
  4. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It

Source Link: The Sahara Transforms Into A Lush And Green Land Every 21,000 Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version