Jakarta – The Sahara Desert, which is known for its expanse of sand, was once green. It turns out that the Sahara Desert has undergone changes over billions of years.
The changes in question range from changes in continental location to the composition of the atmosphere. This was revealed after researchers from Finland and England carried out reconstructions regarding periodic changes or transformations in the Sahara desert.
Reporting from detikEdu, reconstruction process using new modeling. The team also found things that could be used to complete the history of the transformation of the Sahara desert.
“The transformation of the Sahara desert into savanna and forest is one of the most extraordinary environmental changes on Earth,” explained Edward Armstrong, a climate scientist from the University of Helsinki in Finland, quoted from Science Alert.
“Our research is one of the first climate model studies to simulate a humid period in Africa that is comparable to ancient climate observations, to reveal why and when this event occurred,” he added.
Researchers focus on Africa’s humid period. A time period when the African continent was much wetter and greener than today.
Researchers also used climate models to investigate the time span and strength of the factors driving this period.
This also supports the long-standing hypothesis of researchers that the humid period in Africa is driven by the precision of Earth’s orbit.
The precession of the Earth’s orbit is a condition of the way the Earth moves on its axis or rotation in a 21,000 year cycle. This movement of the earth influences the variations between the four seasons and the strength of the African monsoon.
This precision also reveals the existence of warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere. Then at that time the monsoon will occur more frequently in parts of West Africa. This will cause high rainfall in the Sahara desert.
Furthermore, during the ice age when giant glaciers covered the latitudes, there was another discovery that the effect of movement on the Earth’s orbit was reduced and caused the northern regions to become colder.
By knowing that the Sahara desert was once wet and green, this can be used as knowledge about the distribution of humans throughout the world. Even animals such as hippos can inhabit this area.
Humans can take advantage of this opportunity to move across the Sahara desert, which is usually difficult and easy to access and traverse.
“Successfully reconstructing the humid period in North Africa is a major achievement, and means we are now also better able to model human distribution and understand the evolution of the genus in Africa,” said Miikka Tallavaara, a geoscientist at the University of Helsinki.
This article has appeared on detikEdu, read in full here
Watch the video “Woman dies in boarding room in Tasik, killed because of open BO”
(you/you)
2023-10-01 20:00:11
#Sahara #Desert #Green #Heres #History
