Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
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Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#2Somewhat off topic, but if anyone's read Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, he talks about how the American Southwest, specifically Arizona, used to be green. Apparently the familiar reddish brown resulted from human impact
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#3[dead]
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#4Sahara could be green again in the future once the East African Rift becomes a new ocean 10 million years from now.
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#5Somewhat off topic, but if anyone's read Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, he talks about how the American Southwest, specifically Arizona, used to be green. Apparently the familiar reddish brown resulted from human impact
I went to school in Socorro, NM which was very brown on a dry year and pretty green on a wet year and my understanding is that it was a pretty grassland before white folks showed up but overgrazing caused the creosote bush to move in.
If you go up the hills to the plains of San Augustin where the VLA radio telescope that is around 7000 feet in elevation and I think a bit cooler and wetter and that is a very pretty grassland where you see big herds of antelope grazing and you might think you were in Africa.
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#6Somewhat off topic, but if anyone's read Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, he talks about how the American Southwest, specifically Arizona, used to be green. Apparently the familiar reddish brown resulted from human impact
What’s the proposed mechanism for that? It doesn’t seem plausible to me on the surface.
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#7Carbon emissions ACCELERATED climate change. Climate change is natural. It's the ACCELERATED change that is the problem. Not enough time for species to adjust.
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#8Surprised there's no mention of Sahara Pump Theory[1] in this article.
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#9Somewhat off topic, but if anyone's read Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, he talks about how the American Southwest, specifically Arizona, used to be green. Apparently the familiar reddish brown resulted from human impact
I went to school in Socorro, NM which was very brown on a dry year and pretty green on a wet year and my understanding is that it was a pretty grassland before white folks showed up but overgrazing caused the creosote bush to move in. If you go up the hills to the plains of San Augustin where the VLA radio telescope that is around 7000 feet in elevation and I think a bit cooler and wetter and that is a very pretty gr…
Considering that there are archaeological sites in the American Southwest that are posited to have been abandoned due to the disappearance of their water supply, it is hard to blame all the aridness on “white folks”. Moreover, when I cycled through the Anza-Borego State Park in California, several of the information boards discussed how hardscrabble the existence of the Native American peoples in this area was, because it was already very much desert and required special strategies to survive.
Re: Why and when the Sahara Desert was green: new research
#10Carbon emissions ACCELERATED climate change. Climate change is natural. It's the ACCELERATED change that is the problem. Not enough time for species to adjust.
Even natural climate changes can be problematic, such as drier climates precipitating the fall of the Roman empire or the late bronze age collapse.