When the Sahara Was Green

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When the Sahara Was Green


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The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re…

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44 Comments

  1. So, 230 green periods in the last 8 million years means they tend to repeat roughly every 35 thousand years (on average). So if the last one started around 14 thousand years ago we could expect the next one in around 21 thousand years. But I wonder, how will the human induced changes affect this. The planet is warming globally now, not just the northern hemisphere this time.. so the winds might be different this time.

    Also, considering our ancestral timeline – there were at least 94 of these periods during human prehistory (starting 3.3 million years ago). And our homo sapiens ancestors must have lived through at least 8 of these during the last 300 thousand years. This adds a whole another dimension to it…

  2. Man it really frustrates me that I'll never see a green Sahara in my lifetime. Seriously it would be so cool to see a hostile desert turn into a lush paradise

  3. Fun fact, South America once had much more plains and much less forest, but these dust movements off the Sahara supply SA with heavy amounts of phosphorus, inducing the rainforest growth

  4. just close your eyes and try to imagine the souless scum that push carbon credits on poor working stiffs kinda makes climate change caused by man look like nothing but GRIFTING!!!

  5. My family is from Iraq, this also makes me think about how the mesopotamia used to be so green as well. It's interesting to consider how this climate change may have changed the order of the world over time as well.

  6. I heard somewhere that there's a link between the dust from the Sahara desert and the formation of the Amazonian Rainforest, If this is true, wouldn't a green Sahara affect the Amazon rainforest? I mean, if the Sarah is green and has lest dust which the Amazon the rainforest needs then wouldn't the Amazon rainforest shrink? Does anyone know what the Amazon rainforest was like during the green Sahara period?

  7. Are you paid by someone who says that humans have nothing to do with climate change? Why you don't mention that the african cattle shepherds were one of the main reason of the desertification in the Sahara region?

  8. Яшил Сохро Аператсияси Конго дарйоси серсувлиги Ахамиятли Сохрога каттасув келтраш мумкин Яшил Сохро Аператсияси

  9. "Solar radiation is always changing due to Natural Orbital Cycles". Yet big government and academia allowed this video to stay up. Unlike the one that explains how we are coming out of an Earth Ice Age, one of only four.

  10. BUT CLIMATE CHANGE…Is Man Made. How dare anyone suggest that the earth has cycles of; warm/cold…wet/dry…feast/famine. There's NO WAY modern "experts" are incorrect. Gotta Trust The Science without question!

  11. Saw another video where it explains how the Sahara drying up gave birth (or maybe rebirth?) to the Amazon. Amazing how intertwined everything is on our planet.

  12. I am a geologist and I worked for 1 year in the middle of Sahara desert on the Mauritania-Mali border. In many places, small, lime remnants of paleo lakes are visible. Ostrich eggs (semi-fossilized), grinding stones, obsidian axe, and arrowheads are easily found around these paleolakes. Sahara was green for sure not long time ago..

  13. What is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is that this event of dyring up of the Sahara and other regions, which forced people to migrate to places with enough water, might have been the driving force for the evolution of human society which then had to live near permanent and plentifull sources of water (rivers and lakes), and had to adopt to a life style of small populations living far from each other and a nomadic existence of gather hunterers into smaller areas and had to invent ways of producing enough food on smaller areas, causing the invention of agricultural technology and building technology, so creating cities and organizing society to deal with large groups of people living close together, and the advent of different jobs as the agricultural techniques allowed for surplus of food with fewer people working to grow food. Human society would have been quite different if this climatic change had not happened, we would perhaps still have lived as nomadic tribes.

  14. So… according to ipcc projections, 4 degrees warming will make the Sahara quite a bit wetter. Maybe similar to the Sahel region. So not so bad, then?

  15. Why is it that this warming caused greening of the Sahara, but current CO2-induced warming is having the opposite effect and causing desertification in the Sahel – something to do with Earth's tilt and how far north the monsoon reaches maybe?