User talk:Fuhghettaboutit/Black Desert

Black Desert (Sahra as-Sauda) between Farafra and Bahariya oasis, Egpyt.

The Black Desert (24 degrees North, 25 degrees East) (in Arabic: Arabic: الصحراء الليبية [Sahara Suda]) is begins approximately 32mi/50km south of Bawiti, where the beige-colored landscape transitions to black, the color change resulting from the dispersal of eroded mountain material.

Common Black Desert sites sites to visit include the Farafra Oasis, Bahariya Oasis, Crystal Mountain and the nearby White Desert.

in the northern and eastern part of the Sahara Desert. It occupies Egypt west of the Nile (hence the term 'Western Desert' to describe it's Egyptian portion), eastern Libya and northwestern Sudan alongside the Nubian Desert. Covering an area of approximately 1,100,000 square kilometers, it extends approximately 1100 km from east to west, and 1,000 km from north to south, in about the shape of a rectangle. Like most of the Sahara, this desert is primarily sand and hamada or stony plain.

File:File:Black desert-egypt.JPG

The Black Desert

Sand plains, dunes, ridges and some depressions (basins) typify the region, and no rivers drain into or out of the area. The desert's Gilf Kebir Plateau reaches an altitude of just over 1000 meters. and along with the nearby massif of Jebel Uweinat, is an exception to the uninterrupted territory of basement rocks covered by layers of horizontally bedded sediments, forming a massive sand plain, low plateaus and dunes.

There are eight depressions in the eastern Libyan Desert, and all are considered oases except the smallest, Qattara, because its waters are salty. Limited agricultural production, the presence of some natural resources, and permanent settlements are found in the other seven depressions, all of which have fresh water provided by the Nile or by local groundwater.

The Siwa Oasis, close to the Libyan border and west of Qattara, is isolated from the rest of Egypt but has sustained life since ancient times. Waw an Namus in the very centre of Libya, is an extinct volcano with reed-filled pools in its crater but no cultivation or habitation. The other major oases include Dakhla and Kharga in Egypt, and Jaghbub and Kufra in Libya. Apart from Kufra they form a topographic chain of basins extending from the Al Fayyum Oasis (sometimes called the Fayyum Depression) which lies sixty kilometers southwest of Cairo, south to the Bahariya, Farafra and Dakhla oases before reaching the country's largest oasis, Kharga Oasis. A brackish lake, Lake Karun, at the northern reaches of Al Fayyum Oasis, drained into the Nile in ancient times. For centuries sweetwater artesian wells in the Fayyum Oasis have permitted extensive cultivation in an irrigated area that extends over 2,100 square kilometers.

Key geographic feaures of the Libyan Desert

The Libyan Desert is sometimes claimed to be separate entity from the Sahara by traditional British geographers, but this designation most probably has its origins based on the politics of the colonial era when French North African colonies occupied the 'Sahara'. The Brits wanted something else. What really defines the Libyan Desert as separate from the rest of the Sahara (including western Libya) is its extreme aridity (a consequences of the Asian monsoon). Because of the consequent lack of ground water, vegetation is much more sparse, therefore (along with wildlife) no notable camel-borne nomadic culture developed here as it did in the less arid west and south. As a consequence no major trade routes developed as without wells travel by camel was so marginal. It became one of the last corners of the Sahara to be explored by Europeans, and mostly notably the first to see the regular use of motor cars by the likes of Pat Clayton. The desert features a striking diversity of landscapes including mountains like Jebel Uweinat (1980m, the Gilf Kebir plateau, and sand seas as detailed below. The Libyan Desert is barely populated apart from the modern settlements in eastern Libya. The indigenous population might be described as Arabic and Berber in the north and Tubu in the south. In WWII the area became famed as being the region of operations of the Siwa-based Long Range Desert Group or LRDG, whose daring, vehicle-borne desert raids stretched as far west as Murzuk.

The Gilf Kebir

The Gilf Kebir plateau rises to around 1100 metres in the south and lies in the south west corner of Egypt. It is similar in structure to the other sandstone plateaus of the central Sahara; its southern rim rising in sheer cliffs separated by wadis. The northern part is more broken and supports three large wadis of which Wadi Hamra and Adb el Malik are the most distinctive. Here there is scant vegetation but a profusion of Neolithic artefacts and rock art. Indeed the southern Gilf and Uweinat are among the richest troves of rock art in the Sahara. The 'Cave of the Swimmers' as featured in The English Patient film is actually Wadi Sora, discovered by the real life Laszlo Almasy in the 1930s. The so-called 'swimming figures' here are in bad shape, but as late as 2002 a spectacular new cave was discovered nearby, displaying hitherto unseen prehistoric imagery. New discoveries continue to be made. Just north of the Gilf, among the shallow peripheral dunes of the southern Great Sand Sea is a field of Libyan Desert Glass or 'desert emerald', a piece of which was recently found to feature in a piece of Tutankamun's jewellry.

The Three Sand Seas

The three sand seas, which contain dunes up to 512 meters in height cover approximately one quarter of the region. They include:

• Great Sand Sea
• Kalansho Sand Sea
• Rebiana Sand Sea

Modern Exploration

The Sahara was traversed by mostly Muslims traders, natives and pilgrims of which the best known is Ibn Battuta. The first European explorer to the Sahara was the German Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs. In his expeditions on 1865 in he received much resistance from the natives of the Saharan oases and kingdoms he's visited. Because of the much resistance to all European explorers at the time specially by Senussis Ikhwan, Rohlfs managed to come back with several important findings and a first map of the Libyan Desert. Unfortunately it contained inaccuracies in the mapping and intentions of the natives.

It was not before the 1924, when Ahmed Hassanein undertook a 3500 km expedition with a camel caravan that the first accurate maps were drawn and the mountain of Jebel Uweinat with springs at its base was discovered. He wrote important accounts on the Senussi sect, explaining their lifestyle and ethics to the civilised world in his important book The Lost Oases. Ralph Bagnold, who went on to help found the LRDG, greatly extended the knowledge of the area (as well as developing techniques still used today for driving cars in sand) with many journeys in the 1920s and 30s using Model T Fords.

In 1935, the famous French aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry crashed in the northern Libyan Desert. After miraculously surviving, he and his plane's mechanic nearly died of thirst before being rescued by a nomad. This event is described in Exupery's book Wind, Sand, and Stars. The wreck of the B24 bomber Lady Be Good, discovered 200 km north of Kufra 15 years after it was reported missing during WWII, had a less happy ending.

External links

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[[Category:Deserts of Egypt [[Category:Deserts of Libya [[Category:Deserts of Sudan

[[ar:الصحراء الليبية