Sand Tornado (Desert Week)
We’re continuing the first annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!
The Sahara is probably the world’s most famous desert, and covers much of northern Africa. However today we’re only looking at one tiny part of the desert, in the country of Niger.
It’s not obvious at first, but if you look closely at the top of this sand dune you’ll see what we think is a dust devil (which is like a tornado made of sand).
Sandstorms are common in the Sahara and the walls of sand can reach up to 6,000 metres high. In fact, so much sand is blown up into the air that the Earth has an atmospheric layer made up entirely of Sahara sand!
This image comes to Google Earth as part of the National Geographic Megaflyover project. See all our previous posts for more of the fantastic high-resolution images.
Read more on Dust Devils and the Sahara on Wikipedia.
Thanks to Yvan.
It’s called a “dust devil”, not a “sand tornado”!
@Jay: Oh yeah! I’d never heard that term before
When I lived in Vegas I saw trash tornadoes… or would that be trash devils… I also saw several of the dust devils and only one sand storm back in the summer of 2002
Looks like this place is in the middle of the desert, yet there is a settlement nearby: Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
If the SAL is “made up entirely of Sahran sand” it would be so dense it would block out the sun. There is obviously a mixture of “sand” and air. Also the wiki page doesn’t say, unless I missed it, that sand is in the SAL it refers to dust which are much finer particles than sand.
See definitions:
Sand is a granular material made up of fine rock particles. Sand is a naturally occurring, finely divided rock, comprising particles or granules ranging in size from 0.0625 (or mm) to 2 millimeters. An individual particle in this range size is termed a sand grain. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand
Dust is a general name for minute solid particles with diameters less than 500 micrometers. On Earth, dust occurs in the atmosphere from various sources; soil dust lifted up by wind, volcanic eruptions, and pollution are some examples. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust
I nominate this for most awesome post of all time. Simply fantastic.
Whoo! Desert week! This is exciting for me, because I live in Palm Springs (CA), which is in the desert. No idea what the desert is called, but it is still a desert.
If you zoom out on this one it turns into some kind of a strange overlap view which is also weird!