Scientists Terrifying New Discovery Under Sahara Desert Changes Everything!




This is the map of Africa. If you look to the South, you will see lush vegetation, with lots of greenery. However, when you go north, things are different. Covering multiple countries, it is the most gigantic desert globally, with miles and miles of dune formation.

Altogether, the Sahara Desert covers 9 million square kilometers, meaning it will swallow Spain 18 times! However, did you know that this vast stretch of sterile sand covering a third of the African continent was covered in lush vegetation thousands of years ago? What happened to the Sahara? And what is happening to it right now?

In this article we look at the terrifying discoveries scientists made  under the Sahara desert! The Atlantic Ocean borders the Sahara 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.

The Sahara desert is most famous for the sand dune fields often featured in movies. The dunes can reach almost 600 feet or 183 meters high. However, they cover only about 15 percent of the entire desert. Other topographical features include mountains, plateaus, sand- and gravel-covered plains, salt flats, basins, and depressions.

The Sahara used to be a tropical area, so how did it become the harsh arid region it is today? The answer to this question takes us several thousands of years back. The Sahara has long been subject to periodic bouts of humidity and aridity. These fluctuations are caused by slight wobbles in the tilt of the Earth's orbital axis, which in turn changes the angle at which solar radiation penetrates the atmosphere.

At repeated intervals throughout Earth's history, there's been more energy pouring in from the sun during the West African monsoon season. During those times, known as African Humid Periods, much more rain comes down over North Africa. With more rain, the region gets more greenery and rivers and lakes. But between 8,000 and 4,500 years ago, something strange happened:

The transition from humid to dry occurred far more rapidly in some areas than could be explained by the orbital precession alone, resulting in the Sahara Desert as we know it today. As he pored the archaeological and environmental data, obtained chiefly from sediment cores and pollen records, all dated to the same period, he noticed what seemed like a pattern.

Wherever the archaeological record showed the presence of pastoralists, that is, humans with their domesticated animals, there was a corresponding change in the types and variety of plants. It was as if, every time humans and their goats and cattle hopscotched across the grasslands, they had turned everything to scrub and desert in their wake! This led Wright to conclude that by overgrazing the grasses, they were reducing the amount of atmospheric moisture-you know, plants give off moisture, which produces clouds-and enhanced albedo.

He says this may have triggered the end of the humid period more abruptly than can be explained by the orbital changes. these nomadic humans also may have used fire as a land management tool, which would have exacerbated the speed at which the desert took hold. Now, when you think of the Sahara desert, do you imagine whales frolicking on the rolling sand dunes? While that is highly unlikely to happen since whales can't survive outside water, there is evidence that the ancestors of the modern whale once swam around right in the hot African desert!

Rewind to 1902 when a team of geologists guided their camels into a valley in Egypt's Western Desert. Centuries of strong wind had sculpted sandstone rocks into strange shapes, and at night the moonlight was so bright, making the sand glow like gold. A nearby hill was known as the "Mountain of Hell" because of the infernal summer heat, but in this arid valley lay the bones of whales! Some of the skeletons were 50 feet long, with vertebrae as thick as campfire logs.

They dated back 37 million years to an era when a shallow, tropical sea covered this area and all of northern Egypt! And although the geologists didn't realize it at the time, the prehistoric specimens in the sand would offer clues to one of evolution's most nagging questions: how whales became whales. One clue found from these long-dead whales was the presence of feet!

Scientists had long suspected that whales were terrestrial mammals that had eased into the ocean over millions of years, gradually losing their four legs. Proof of this is that modern whales have vestigial hind leg bones. But little in the fossil record illustrated the transition until paleontologists began excavating hundreds of whale fossils buried at Wadi Hitan and finding legs and knees!

Older specimens of footed whales have since been identified, but Wadi Hitan's are unparalleled in their numbers and state of preservation. The valley, about a three-hour drive from Cairo, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site visited by some 14,000 people each year! paleontologists speculate that whales' landlubber ancestors were deer- or pig-like scavengers living near the sea.

About 55 million years ago, they started spending more time in the water, first eating dead fish along the shore and then chasing prey in the shallows and then wading deeper. As they did, some of them evolved traits that facilitated hunting in water. Over time, since they no longer had to bear their total body weight at sea, they got bigger, their backbones elongating and their rib cages broadening.Most of the fossils in the valley belong to two types.

Basilosaurus was the giant with an almost eel-like body. The more petite but heavily muscled Dorudon looked more like a modern whale, at least until its mouth opened to reveal a jaw lined with serrated daggers instead of peg-like teeth. Interestingly, the fossils of more than 75 whales have been found in the middle of the5:41 Atacama desert in Chile. How they ended up there has been a subject of debate among scientists.