Sunday, November 17, 2019

Travel Journal Week 3 (Desert) - Derek Bryant


Hello Class,

My journey through the world deserts took me to the Sahara Desert in Northern Africa, the Sahara is one of the largest deserts on our planet, it places third behind the Antarctic and Arctic regions for its dry climate and low precipitation. The Sahara was created through a combination of warm winds coming from the west of Africa by an adjacent offshore cold winds warming from the sea when entering dry land, to dry air arriving from the South near the equator due to evaporation of water which causes the cool rainwater to warm and evaporate as it moves away from the equator. The final and major faction to this desert is rain shadow from the Northwest from the Atlas Mountains and from the Southeast from the Ethiopian Highlands. Rain shadow is caused by cool winds condensing and forming rain on one side of the mountain and once it crosses to the other side begins to descend, warm up, and provides little to no rain to that region. The Sahara has many sand dunes and oasis, but these features are created from special events that happen throughout the desert itself.


The Sahara Desert. (2019)

The Sahara, through the force of heavy winds, pushes sand across the region. This creates the waves you see in the photo above which are called traps. Once the sand hits a big enough trap it will stay on the resting side of the trap until that is eroded and pushed further East across the Sahara. This forms cross-bedding underneath each trap, this is caused by the direction of the wind. If the wind was to change it will change the cross-bedding.

The Oasis. (2019)
This windy event, through enough force can create blowouts which leads to the desert opening the water table. This leads to the production of an Oasis, where water can form and creates small ponds to small lake of water and helps create nearby vegetation (As seen in above photo). The sediments from this desert is both sand and silt that is travelling from west Africa to the Middle East. The silt from this desert can travel across the world which is called loess, some of that silt is even in the United States in farmlands which helps create the agriculture we have within our nation.

Respectfully,

Derek

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