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Once green, the Sahara expanded 5,500 years ago, leading ancient herders to follow the rain and grasslands south to eastern Africa. But about 2,000 years ago, their southward migration stalled out, stopped in its tracks, archaeologists presumed, by tsetse-infested bush and disease. As the theory goes, the tiny tsetse fly altered the course of history, stopping the spread of domesticated animal herding with a bite that carries sleeping sickness and nagana, diseases often fatal for the herder and the herded. Now, isotopic research on animal remains from a nearly 2,000-year-old settlement near Gogo Falls in the present-day bushy woodlands of...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

A massive Sahara Desert dust cloud is drifting 5,000 miles over the Atlantic towards the US - and experts have warned it could bring extreme heat while impacting air quality in five southeastern states.Skies over Florida, along with southern swathes of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, will look 'a little hazy' and could turn brown from the sandy plume as it lingers over the weekend. Along with haze, the desert dust will catalyze scorching temperatures of around 105 degrees in the Sunshine State and an uptick in allergies - but it will also bring brighter sunsets and suppress tropical thunderstorms,...

Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming. Recently, more detailed insights were gained from a combination of sediment cores extracted from the Mediterranean Sea and results from climate computer modeling, which an international research team, including University of Hawai'i at Mānoa oceanography researcher Tobias Friedrich, examined for the first time. The layers of the seafloor tell the story of major environmental changes in North Africa over the past 160,000 years. Analyzing such sediments would help to better...

This story is actually quite fascinating and it obviously has something to do with changes in the climate, but just how to explain it all remains a subject of contention. You would think that increasing temperatures would make things worse in the deserts of the world, but in a rather counterintuitive instance of planet watching, it appears that the Sahara desert may actually be shrinking. A few thousand years ago, a mighty river flowed through the Sahara across what is today Sudan. The Wadi Howar—now just a dried-out riverbed for most of the year—sustained not just fish, crocodiles, and...

How dust from the Sahara is fuelling the Amazon

Reconstructing the climate of the past is an important tool for scientists to better understand and predict future climate changes that are the result of the present-day global warming. Although there is still little known about the Earth's tropical and subtropical regions, these regions are thought to play an important role in both the evolution of prehistoric man and global climate changes. New North African climate reconstructions reveal three 'green Sahara' episodes during which the present-day Sahara Desert was almost completely covered with extensive grasslands, lakes and ponds over the course of the last 120.000 years. The findings of Dr....

OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a...

...the Garamantes - a mysterious desert people of Greco-Roman date (broadly 500 BC AD 500)... Inhabiting a region that had already been for several thousand years a hyper-arid desert environment, with negligible rainfall, elevated summer temperatures and blistering expanses of barren sand and rock... have long been an enigma. They were depicted by Roman sources as ungovernable nomadic barbarians, who raided the settled agricultural zone and cities of the Mediterranean littoral. Following up earlier work by Daniels, the current project allows a different picture of the Garamantes to be drawn. Archaeological evidence shows them to have been a complex and...

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

A plan to build a 6,000km-long wall across the Sahara Desert to stop the spread of the desert has been outlined. The barrier - formed by solidifying sand dunes - would stretch from Mauritania in the west of Africa to Djibouti in the east. The plan was put forward by architect Magnus Larsson at the TED Global conference in Oxford. A 2007 UN study described desertification as "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".

DESERTIFICATION threatens to drive millions of people from their homes in coming decades while vast dust storms can damage the health of people continents away, an international report said today. "Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone," said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the UN University's water academy and a lead author of a report drawing on the work of 1360 scientists in 95 nations. Two billion people live in drylands vulnerable to desertification, ranging from northern Africa to swathes of central Asia, he said. And storms can lift dust from the Sahara Desert, for instance, and cause...

The African source of the Amazon's fertilizer Sid Perkins In the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, massive dust storms from the African Sahara waft southwest across the Atlantic to drop tons of vital minerals on the Amazon basin in South America. Now, scientists have pinpointed the source of many of those dust storms and estimated their dust content. ON THE WAY. Satellite photo shows dust (arrow), bound for the Amazon, blowing away from the Sahara's Bodélé depression. NASA The Amazonian rainforest depends on Saharan dust for many of its nutrients, including iron and phosphorus (SN: 9/29/01, p. 200: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010929/bob9.asp)....

It's Saharan dust season in the Atlantic, when massive clouds of dust from Africa's Sahara Desert are carried westward by wind, sometimes reaching all the way to the United States.

At least 40 to 60 vehicles collided along a busy roadway in Central Illinois on Monday as a result of a dust storm, officials have reported. “The cause of the crash is due to excessive winds blowing dirt from farm fields across the highway leading to zero visibility,” Illinois State Police said in a press release. I-55 was shut down in Sangamon and Montgomery counties as a result of the accidents along the highway, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation. Sangamon County is home to Springfield, the state capital. Winds across the region had been blowing between 35 and...

Six people were confirmed dead in a series of highway collisions Monday in rural Illinois that were blamed on a blinding dust storm, authorities said. More than 30 people, ages 2 to 80, were hospitalized with injuries ranging from minor to life-threatening, Illinois State Police Maj. Ryan Starrick said at an early evening news conference.

Burning Man partiers were battered by a huge sandstorm over the weekend that threatened to ruin the finale of nine-day-long Nevada festival as hundreds left early to escape the dust while others strip off in 102F heat. The dust storm hit the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where it's been held since the early 1990s, on Saturday just before the main Burning Man event on Sunday — where the wooden 'man' effigy is ignited. The week-long festival has long been a tradition, frequented by scantily-clad individuals looking to let loose and soak in the event's characteristically psychedelic atmosphere. Burning Man's...

...A blinding dust storm moving at hurricane force winds of 90mph has blanketed half of Kansas and knocked out power to nearly 120,000 residents Wednesday night. Footage of the powerful storm posted to social media show the winds whipping red dust at such high speeds that nearly nothing in front of the camera could be seen, as drivers were forced to pull over... ...The Kansas Department of Transportation reports that highways throughout the state are closed, and staff had to be evacuated from the air traffic control center of the Kansas City International Airport.... ...The National Weather Service in Wichita...

VIDEO MODEL: Half Of The United States To Be Covered In Atmospheric Saharan Dust Storm Through The Coming Week Period - Tag a friend/family member in the comment section below, share to spread information The National Weather Force dust forecast model clearly shows the deep Saharan dust field coming into the Caribbean and moving through the Eastern half of the USA over the next 7 days.Use my model in this video to show the deepest areas of dust, and you will notice a sky color change, including the beautiful sunrise and sunset colors. K.MARTINSenior Meteorologisthttps://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=278308190036371 

The dust is finally beginning to clear on Mars, but it'll probably still be a while before NASA's sidelined Opportunity rover can phone home. A global dust storm has enshrouded Mars for more than a month, plunging the planet's surface into perpetual darkness. That's complicated life significantly for the solar-powered Opportunity, which has apparently put itself into a sort of hibernation; the rover hasn't contacted its controllers since June 10. Scientists studying the storm "say that, as of Monday, July 23, more dust is falling out than is being raised into the planet's thin air," agency officials added. "That means...