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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...

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 

Westward swirling clouds of dust from the Sahara Desert might be putting a damper on Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzing satellite data from the past 25 years found that during years when the dust storms rose up, fewer hurricanes swept across the Atlantic, while periods of low dust storm activity were followed by more intense hurricane activity. Hurricanes are fueled by heat and moisture, and it's thought the dust storms help muffle the storms before they fully develop. By doing so, however, the dust storms could shift a hurricane's direction further to the west, the researchers...

Another storm is headed toward South Florida -- and it's not a hurricane. Born in the desert of North Africa, an immense cloud of Saharan sand is being swept across the Atlantic Ocean by the tradewinds. By early next week, South Floridians will experience hazy blue skies, bright orange sunsets and coats of reddish dust on their cars, the National Weather Service said Friday. ''This is not going to be a tremendous event, but it will be kind of interesting,'' said Jim Lushine, a severe weather expert with Miami's weather bureau. The sand is lifted from the Sahara Desert, piggybacking...

The cloud heading this way is almost as big as the United States, Lushine said. Thought this was out of the ordinary. The size anyhow. http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/story/5040423p-4596815c.html

MIAMI -- An enormous, hazy cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert is blowing toward the southern United States, but meteorologists do not expect much effect beyond colorful sunsets. The leading edge of the cloud _ nearly the size of the continental United States _ should move across Florida sometime from Monday through Wednesday. "This is not going to be a tremendous event, but it will be kind of interesting," said Jim Lushine, a severe weather expert with the National Weather Service in Miami. He said the dust could make sunrises and sunsets spectacular. It might not have much effect...

A dust storm over Morocco with strong winds sweeping thick Saharan Desert dust off the coast of Morocco out over the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean is seen in this March 12 satellite image. The true-color image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASAs Aqua satellite. (AP Photo/MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC)

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.