A rare deluge of rainfall has left lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara desert. Some regions are seeing more water than they had in decades.
    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.worldEnglish
      251·
      2 months ago

      A green Sahara would be nice. Too bad it took a planet wide catastrophe to see it happen.

      • TeoTwawki@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        2 months ago

        the sahara turning fully green could actually be another kind of disaster - parts of the food chain rely on dust from the sahara blowing over the atlantic to provide essential nutrient/minerals for smaller organisms that slightly less small organism feed on.

        https://www.popsci.com/environment/sahara-dust-atlantic/

        migrating dust clouds originating in the Sahara Desert are crucial to fostering life in the Atlantic Ocean as far away as the Amazonian basin

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          31·
          2 months ago

          It’s okay, the Amazon will die off from other things first. (/s but only on it being okay)

          As far as the human food chain goes, a single round of fertiliser will easily match millennia of windblown desert dust.

      • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        191·
        2 months ago

        It’s actually not nice, not for local wildlife, for example. Biomes exist for a reason and if anything changes abruptly, evolution can’t keep up with these changes, resulting in extinction of several species. Just like flowers are blooming in Antarctica, a rainy and green Sahara is as beautiful as a rose with thorns under its petals: really beautiful, but ominously dangerous.

        • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          61·
          2 months ago

          Biomes exist for a reason

          Yessuh.

          That’s why I always dug quarantine tunnels in Terraria.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Hmm. Given how much it’s gone back and forth already, I wonder how much worse it would be this time. It is happening a lot faster.

      • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
        3·
        2 months ago

        Serious questions here. The world, by design, has arid zones around the tropics. If we heat up the planet, does that mean deserts pop up in other places? Like, will the Sahara and Cape Town turn green, but Spain and Italy and Argentina turn to desert? And if that’s the case, will hurricanes more often frequent New England, but less frequent Florida? Also, isn’t one of the major reasons we have hurricanes in the first place due to Sahara seeding them? If less desert then…?

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          Yes.

          IIRC in the green Sahara scenarios the arid band moves north into the Mediterranean, and so southern Europe and North Africa get messed up. On other continents, it’s already getting noticeably weird and dry where I am on the western great plains.

          There’s still a lot of uncertainty about whether agriculture, for example, will benefit, worsen or break even due to climate change. Total global precipitation increases, but so does variability both through time and location, and then the heat and the CO2 itself has an effect. It’s all very complicated.

          Also, isn’t one of the major reasons we have hurricanes in the first place due to Sahara seeding them? If less desert then…?

          A good chunk of this current hurricane season just didn’t happen, and it was all down to unusual conditions in Africa. On the flip side, each hurricane will be more intense due to hotter seas (which, again, we’re probably seeing right now).

          There’s a pattern here. A different climate isn’t bad, per se. It’s the rapid change to a different climate. This sort of thing is supposed to take hundreds of thousands of years, not a century or two. As a result we’re creating a mass extinction.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          I don’t have a good answer to your question, but I do know lengthy droughts in certain areas are a likely fallout from climate change, so I’d say that would be a good possibility.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Fun fact, it never left. It’s been one of the most populous areas all along, and it’s still the third most populous country in Africa (after Nigeria and Ethiopia). It’s just that it’s not the only happening place anymore.

  • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    69·
    2 months ago

    and finally, proof that the Sahara is not a desert. just like when it snows outside it’s proof that global warming is a hoax, rainfall proves that deserts are a hoax. the Sahara is a rainforest, wake up sheeple.

    • where_am_i@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      we’ll see how rare is the new “rare” event. Next thing you know Sahara is a well-known rainforest and amazon is the well-known desert.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        During the ice age, the Sahara was savanna, and it’s though to be possible it could go back due to climate change.

        That would be a nice silver lining on a mostly very bad mistake, I guess.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    2 months ago

    I wonder if this is due to gobal climate change or local efforts towards sustainable farming and forestry to reclaim areas the Sahara has encroached on in recent years. Could be both.

  • Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    Credit where due - this is a rare example of an article that contains pictures of the fantastical thing noted in the headline. Was this written by a journalism student or something?

  • Baphomet_The_Blasphemer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    129·
    2 months ago

    Anyone else get irrationally angry when someone calls it the Sahara dessert? No, just me?

    It bothers me because “Sahara” is Arabic for desert, so the headline to this article is calling it the desert desert, and apparently, that’s a pet peeve of mine.

      • icedterminal@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        I was under the impression that Tahoe translates to “big water” which is funny.

        But “Tar pit Tar pit”, “Way Way” and “Desert Desert” are indeed infuriating.

    • geissi@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Meh, not everyone speaks Arabic and there are probably people who don’t know that the Sahara is a desert.

      Minor redundancies are a small price to share information with a wider audience.

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      It’s describing the type of desert by specifying its name. Even in situations where it’s not rhe proper name (ie. chai tea), there are equivalent English formations (ie. “tea tea” to distinguish “traditional” tea from other varieties).