58 Fun Facts About Sahara

The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but which continent holds the biggest desert of all?

Antarctica: a desert is defined by how little precipitation falls, not by heat, so the frozen continent's 14 million square kilometres count, about half as big again as the Sahara.

The name Sahara is a broken plural of a word from which language?

Arabic: sahra means 'desert' and sahara is its plural, so 'Sahara Desert' literally says 'deserts desert'.

The Sahara stretches from the Atlantic in the west to which sea in the east?

Red Sea: in the desert mountains behind its Egyptian shore, Roman crews quarried giant granite columns that still hold up the porch of the Pantheon in Rome.

What is the name of the belt of semi-arid savanna that bounds the Sahara to the south?

The Sahel: in the 2000s African nations launched a 'Great Green Wall' of trees across it to hold back the desert.

The Sahara covers about as much land as which country?

United States: the Sahara matches it for size, yet it holds fewer than one person per square mile and huge areas are wholly empty.

In Saharan geography, what is a hamada?

A rocky plateau: wind has carried off the sand and dust and left bare rock, and that kind of stony ground covers far more of the Sahara than sand does.

Which Saharan country stood in for the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars?

Tunisia: George Lucas filmed there and borrowed the planet's name from the southern Tunisian town of Tataouine.

The Tibesti Mountains, home to the Sahara's highest peak, rise mainly in the north of which country?

Chad: deep dry river valleys cut into the range show that the heart of the desert once had a far wetter climate.

Emi Koussi, the highest mountain in the Sahara, is what kind of peak?

A shield volcano: planetary scientists have used it as a close stand-in for Elysium Mons, a giant volcano on Mars.

The Richat Structure, nicknamed the Eye of the Sahara, became a famous landmark for whom?

Astronauts: crews have picked out its bull's-eye rings from orbit since the earliest space missions, because little else breaks up that featureless stretch of desert.

What kind of geological feature is the Richat Structure?

An eroded dome: its bull's-eye rings were first put down to a meteorite strike, but they are layers of uplifted rock that erosion has planed flat.

In 1942 the impassable Qattara Depression anchored the desert line that stopped Rommel at which battle?

El Alamein: with the sea to the north and the depression's marshes and cliffs barring tanks to the south, the British line could not be outflanked.

Which hot wind blows from the Sahara across the Mediterranean into southern Europe?

Sirocco: it leaves North Africa hot, dry and thick with dust, then soaks up moisture over the sea and reaches Europe's coast warm and damp.

When a 1922 North African reading of 58 °C was scrapped in 2012, which place regained the world heat record?

Death Valley: its 56.7 °C from 1913 became the record again after investigators decided the North African figure most likely came from an inexperienced observer misreading the instrument.

A valley in Egypt's Sahara is famous for the fossil skeletons of which sea animals?

Whales: Wadi al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, holds skeletons of early species that were still in the last stages of losing their hind legs.

Why do Saharan nights turn so cold after scorching days?

Dry air: with almost no water vapour or cloud overhead, the day's warmth escapes straight back to space, and winter nights can dip below freezing.

The Cave of Swimmers, a real Saharan site, is a key setting in which Best Picture winner?

The English Patient: the explorer at the heart of the film really did find the cave, and argued that its swimming figures showed the bone-dry desert around it had once held water.

Sahara snow was recorded in 1979 and 2016 at the town of Ain Sefra, in which country?

Algeria: Ain Sefra sits more than 1,000 metres up among the Atlas Mountains, and its 1979 snowstorm lasted just half an hour.

Which classic book opens with a pilot crash-landing in the Sahara?

The Little Prince: its author, the airman Antoine de Saint-Exupery, really was stranded in the Sahara after a crash in the 1930s and spun the ordeal into the tale.

The pressure ridge over the Sahara is the eastern extension of which Atlantic system?

Azores High: when the same system drifts west in summer it is renamed the Bermuda High and brings muggy heat to the far side of the Atlantic.

Botanists mark the northern limit of the Sahara by the northern limit of cultivation of which crop?

Date palm: in every Saharan oasis it is the staple food, and gardeners raise their fruit, vegetables and grain in its shade.

What drives the Sahara's roughly 20,000-year swing between desert and savanna?

Earth's axial precession: the planet's axis wobbles like a spinning top, which shifts the North African monsoon and switches the rains on and off.

Which conqueror trekked deep into the Sahara to consult the oracle at the Siwa oasis?

Alexander the Great: having just taken Egypt, he crossed the desert to the oracle of Amun, whose priests were said to have hailed him as the god's son.

The Dakar Rally, long raced across the Sahara, moved to which continent in 2009?

South America: organisers scrapped the 2008 race over terrorist threats in Africa, and the rally kept the name of the Senegalese finish line it had left behind.

Fog from which cool ocean current waters the lichens and succulents of the Atlantic coastal desert?

Canary: the cold current chills the air enough to choke off rainfall along that shore, yet the same chill leaves it wrapped in humid air and fog.

The Tanezrouft, one of the Sahara's driest and most lifeless regions, is what kind of terrain?

A flat gravel plain: with no water and no landmarks it was long shunned by caravans, yet its firm, level surface suits motor vehicles and now carries a road.

Which dry, dusty wind blows off the Sahara across West Africa every winter?

Harmattan: for all the dust it carries, West Africans nicknamed it 'the doctor', because its dry air comes as a relief after months of sticky tropical heat.

The fennec fox's most distinctive feature is what?

Its very large ears: on the smallest of all foxes, they shed heat and pick up the sound of prey moving under the sand.

The addax, a Saharan animal that almost never needs to drink, is also known as what?

The white antelope: it gets nearly all the water it needs from the plants it eats and the dew on them, and its spiral horns earn it a second name, the screwhorn.

Which big cat has a rare, pale Saharan form that is active mostly at night?

Cheetah: camera traps show the desert cats moving mainly after dark to dodge the heat, at some of the lowest densities ever recorded for a large African carnivore.

Which river animal was still found in the 2010s in rock pools on the Sahara's Ennedi Plateau?

Crocodile: a small group was still living in the plateau's gorge pools in 2018, stranded when the rivers of a once-green Sahara dried up around them.

The deathstalker is what kind of Saharan animal?

Scorpion: it ranks among the most dangerous on Earth, yet a compound first isolated from its venom, chlorotoxin, is now used in cancer research.

The Saharan silver ant forages only in fierce midday heat, when which of its predators must hide?

Lizards: once the sand grows too hot even for them they retreat to their burrows, and the ants pour out to scavenge insects the heat has killed.

Which domesticated animal is the favourite of Saharan nomads for its endurance and speed?

Dromedary: the one-humped camel was probably first tamed in Arabia thousands of years ago, and today no truly wild ones survive anywhere.

Gobero, the Sahara's largest Stone Age graveyard, was found in 2000 by an expedition searching for what?

Dinosaur remains: the fossil hunters stumbled on some 200 burials beside a vanished lake, among them a woman and two children laid to rest with arms entwined.

What did a 1958 dig beneath a Saharan rock shelter uncover?

A mummified child: wrapped in animal skin with the organs removed, the body, more than 5,000 years old, raised the question of whether mummification began outside Egypt.

Nabta Playa, a Saharan stone circle older than Stonehenge, roughly marks sunrise on which day?

Summer solstice: that sunrise came just as monsoon rains refilled the seasonal lake, which may be why nomads raised the stones some 7,000 years ago.

Tifinagh, a script native to the Sahara, descends from an ancient alphabet thought to be modelled on whose writing?

Phoenician: like that seafaring people's alphabet, the desert script writes consonants only, though scholars still debate whether it was copied or merely inspired.

The Garamantes built their empire around 500 BCE in the Fezzan of which modern country?

Archaeologists have found eight major towns in their territory, and a Roman bath in the capital, Garama.

Why did the Garamantes' civilization eventually collapse?

They ran out of groundwater: for centuries their tunnels tapped ancient water that rain never replaced, and its level is thought to have sunk beyond their reach.

Which empire held the Sahara's northern shores when Arab armies arrived in the 7th century?

Byzantine: the empire had seized much of that coast back from the Vandals only a century before, and in the 640s Arab armies took Egypt from it.

Which famous traveller crossed the Sahara by caravan in 1352?

Ibn Battuta: once he was home, his sultan had him dictate almost three decades of travels to a scribe, and that book is how the crossing is known.

Taghaza, a medieval stop on the caravan route across the Sahara, was famous for mining what?

Salt: there was so much of it, and so little else, that the miners' houses were built from slabs of it and roofed with animal skins.

Timbuktu's rise as a centre of trade and learning followed which ruler's visit around 1325?

Mansa Musa: on his way home from a pilgrimage to Mecca, where his lavish gifts of gold are said to have dented its value in Cairo, he had Timbuktu's Great Mosque built.

What fate met the lone Tree of Ténéré, a Saharan landmark, in 1973?

It was hit by a truck: the driver snapped the trunk of a tree whose roots reached 100 feet down to water, and a metal sculpture now stands in its place.

After Spain left Western Sahara in 1975, which country annexed most of the territory?

Morocco: it took the rest when its partner in the carve-up pulled out in 1979, then sealed off its gains behind an earthen wall more than a thousand miles long.

Libya's Great Man-Made River, which Gaddafi called the Eighth Wonder of the World, is what?

A network of water pipes: crews drilling for oil in the 1950s struck water instead, rain that fell before the last ice age ended, and the pipes now carry it north to the coast.

The Trans-Sahara Highway links Algiers on the Mediterranean with the old trading city of Kano in which country?

Nigeria: proposed in the 1960s and all but finished by 2022, the road doubles as a data link, with fibre-optic cable laid along it to carry fast internet across the desert.

Which giant sail-backed predator was first unearthed in the Sahara in 1912?

Spinosaurus: the first bones, dug from Egypt's desert, were destroyed when Allied bombs hit their Munich museum in 1944, and for decades science knew the animal mainly from one German scholar's notes and sketches.

Tassili n'Ajjer, a sandstone plateau deep in the Sahara, is a World Heritage Site for what?

Its prehistoric rock art: more than 15,000 images, the oldest showing elephants, hippos and giraffes, record how a land teeming with life dried into desert.

Western Sahara is a major source of which mined mineral resource?

Phosphates: the rock rides from the desert mine to ships on the Atlantic coast along a conveyor belt more than 60 miles long.

In Saharan geography, what is an erg?

A sea of sand dunes: some of them 'sing', letting out a deep boom as sand slides down the slope, and scientists have offered several rival theories for how.

Which national capital lies within the Sahara?

Nouakchott: a coastal village until it was picked as Mauritania's capital around independence in 1960, it swelled when the droughts of the 1970s drove people off the land.

What is the primary source of the little rain that falls on the southern Sahara?

The Intertropical Convergence Zone: sailors call its windless stretches the doldrums, and each summer the belt follows the sun north just far enough to brush the desert's southern edge with storms.

In 1960 which country set off its first atomic bomb deep in the Sahara?

France: the bomb, code-named Blue Jerboa after a desert rodent, went off on a 100-metre tower, and President de Gaulle hailed a country 'stronger and prouder' that morning.

What human activity is proposed to have accelerated the Sahara's drying between 6000 and 2500 BCE?

Overgrazing by pastoralists: a 2017 study argued that herds of goats and cattle stripped the grassland and cut the moisture that fed the rains, though other scientists doubt people were needed to tip the balance.

Dust blown off the Sahara each year crosses an ocean to fertilise which rainforest?

The Amazon: the richest of that dust rises from a dried-up lake bed, so the remains of tiny creatures that once lived in Saharan water now feed trees an ocean away.

Which Saharan people kept alive Tifinagh, a script descended from an ancient North African alphabet?

The Tuareg: nicknamed the 'blue people' for their indigo veils, they kept the old letters in use, and these were later reworked into a modern alphabet for Berber languages.