Sahara
Desert · 4.73M km²
Sahara is a desert in Africa, covering an estimated 4.73M km². It extends across Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Chad, Mali, Niger, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. It is the largest of the 58 deserts with a mapped extent in YearMaps.
The Sahara (, ) is a desert spanning North Africa. With an area of 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 only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Arctic.
The desert covers much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and the Sudan.
It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean 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 bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan region of sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions, including the western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Aïr Mountains, the Ténéré desert, and the Libyan Desert.
Adapted from Wikipedia: Sahara (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Feature class
- Desert
- Mapped extent
- 4.73M km²
- Size rank
- #1 of 58 deserts
- Region
- Africa
- Countries
- Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Chad, Mali, Niger, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia
- Coordinates
- 27.0430°, 22.0108°
- Ranges:
- Guinea Highlands (Africa), Loma Mountains (Africa)
More about Sahara
Geography
The Sahara covers large parts of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Western Sahara and Sudan, and parts of southern Morocco and Tunisia. It covers 9 million square kilometres (3,500,000 sq mi), 31% of the African continent. If all areas with a mean annual precipitation of less than 250 mm (9.8 in) were included, the Sahara would be 11 million square kilometres (4,200,000 sq mi). It is one of three distinct physiographic provinces of the African massive physiographic division. The Sahara is so large and bright that, in theory, it could be detected from other stars as a surface feature of Earth, with near-current technology.
Climate
The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert. It is located in the horse latitudes under the subtropical ridge, a significant belt of semi-permanent subtropical warm-core high pressure where the air from the upper troposphere usually descends, warming and drying the lower troposphere and preventing cloud formation.
The permanent absence of clouds allows unhindered light and thermal radiation. The stability of the atmosphere above the desert prevents any convective overturning, thus making rainfall virtually non-existent. As a consequence, the weather tends to be sunny, dry and stable with a minimal chance of rainfall. Subsiding, diverging, dry air masses associated with subtropical high-pressure systems are extremely unfavorable for the development of convectional showers.
History
Scientists have identified more than 230 humid periods in North Africa over the past eight million years, recurring at intervals of approximately 21,000 years.
A modern laboratory examination of the Uan Muhuggiag child mummy and Tin Hanakaten child have suggested that the Central Saharan peoples from the Epipaleolithic, Mesolithic, and Pastoral periods possessed dark skin complexions. The creators of the Round Head rock art possessed dark skin.
A 2025 study sequenced individuals from Takarkori (7,000 YBP) and discovered that most of their ancestry was from an unknown ancestral North African lineage, related to the African admixture component found in Iberomaurusians.
Sections adapted from Wikipedia: Sahara (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Sahara: Key Facts
| Area | 9,200,000 km² |
|---|---|
| Highest point | Emi Koussi |
Facts from Wikidata Q6583 (CC0).
