10 Facts About Green Sahara

Vegetation cover then extended over almost all of the Green Sahara and consisted of an open grass savannah with shrubs and trees.

The greening of the Sahara led to a demographic expansion and especially in the Eastern Sahara human occupancy coincides with the AHP.

The Central and Southern Green Sahara saw the development of alluvial deposits while sebkha deposits are known from the Western Green Sahara.

Precipitation in the Green Sahara probably reached no more than 500 millimetres per year, with large uncertainty.

Various studies have been conducted to determine which effects reduced dust supply and the greening of the Sahara would have had on its intensity, with conflicting results on which effects would predominate.

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One climate model has indicated that a greener Sahara and reduced dust output would have increased tropical cyclone activity, especially over the Atlantic but in most other tropical cyclone basins.

The transition from the "green Sahara" to the present-day dry Sahara is considered to be the greatest environmental transition of the Holocene in northern Africa; today almost no precipitation falls in the region.

The debate on how quickly the Green Sahara formed goes back to 1849, when the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt suggested that only a quick drying could form the desert.

Dunes formed in the dried-up Green Sahara or began moving again after stabilizing during the AHP.

Today, the Green Sahara is the single largest source of dust in the world, with far ranging effects on climate and ecosystems, such as the growth of the Amazon rainforest.