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The Desert Tells Its Tales
Sand visible as far as the eye can see. Every individual grain of sand in the Sahara has a story to tell. It is the triturated time of mountainous massifs, seas, rivers or the ice age. With nine million square kilometers (circa 3.5 milion square miles), the Sahara is the largest dry desert on the planet and stretches from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. It came into being three billion years ago and has been fooded at least eight times in the course of time. Even in this current day, dry riverbeds can be found in the landscape – a sign that water must have once flown there. However, only 10 % of the Sahara is a sandy desert. Many large areas are covered by boulders, salt marshes, gravel desert and mountain ranges such as the Hoggar and the Tibesti mountains. On three quarters of the desert surface, there is no vegetation; the rest consists of veldt, in which plants and animals have adjusted themselves to extreme conditions. During the day, it‘s dry and reaches up to 55 degrees. Oases that consist of around 200,000 square kilometers (circa 77,000 square miles) of surface provide living conditions for roughly two million people.