According to satellite images released by NASA, the Sahara desert is turning green, as heavy rainfall causes vegetation to grow in the typically barren land.
While much of the torrential rain fell in sparsely populated areas, more than 1,000 people have reportedly died from flooding in parts of West and Central Africa, including Chad, Nigeria, Mali and Niger per The Associated Press. Close to 4 million people across 14 African countries have been impacted by flooding.
Areas that have been starved of rain for so long are now seeing traces of green sprouting up – life has returned to the Sahara Desert after an extratropical cyclone drenched a large swath of northwestern Africa on Sept. 7 and Sept. 8.
Dry landscapes in countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya are now embracing green vegetations now.
Plants like shrubs and trees for example have been observed in low-lying areas, like riverbeds, Sylwia Trzaska, a climate researcher has told ABC News.
Source: ABC News
“It looks like a desert, and then when the rain comes, then everything starts greening very quickly,” Trzaska said.
It is not wholly unusual for the plant life to sprout in the Sahara when a deluge of rain pours in, past research has shown. When parched regions in this part of Africa get heavy rainfall, the flora responds almost readily, Peter de Menocal, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution also told ABC News.
According to Peter, “When you get these really exceptional rainfall events, the dunes become these just incredibly verdant and flowered fields where the plants will just instantly grow for a short period of time to take advantage of.”
Climate change could cause the rain belt to shift farther northward in the future, according to a study published in Nature earlier this year. But as the ocean temperatures elsewhere in the world catch up to the Atlantic the rain belt will likely shift back down, even south of the equator, De Menocal said.
“Decades from now, when the larger oceans have warmed more uniformly, we expect the rain belt to actually go back to its original position, and it can even shift into the other hemisphere,” he said.
According to a 2012 paper authored by De Menocal, the Sahara was covered with vegetation and lakes between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago – the region once permanently experienced the presence of lush greenery.
