On December 19th, 2017, snow was seen settling on a section of the huge desert in the town of Ain Sefra, in Algeria. Photographer Karim Bouchetata caught the moment
Why the Snow in Sahara Desert? By Fatoumata Oumar
Africa may be in for some magical miracles soon. Or is it the Ice Age coming? For the first time in 39 years, it snowed in the Sahara Desert, the largest hot desert on the planet spanning 3,600,000 square miles.
It is not the usual place for a sprinkling of snow.
On December 19th, 2017, snow was seen settling on a section of the huge desert in the town of Ain Sefra, in Algeria. Photographer Karim Bouchetata caught the moment. He said everyone was “stunned” to see the snow falling in the desert. He said the snow settled for about a day before it melted away.
That was the second snowing in that part of Algeria. The first in human memory was said to be seen in Ain Sefra was on February 18, 1979, when a snow storm lasted for half an hour.
The north African country does not often see snow – although it is possible.
In higher regions snow can fall on a regular basis during the winter and subzero temperatures are not uncommon.
But snow falling on part of the sand dunes which span thousands of miles is much more unusual.
It is not known for certain why it has snowed in this part of Algeria, although it does snow in other parts of the country.
The country hosts part of the Atlas Mountain range, which extends some 2,500km across northwestern Africa.
Times of London recalls that the world’s weather seems to be going crazy. “A savage freeze in North America caused temperatures to fall to record lows, more than 70 people died during the intense cold last weekend in northern India and Nepal, and heavy snowfall caused disruption for more than two million people in parts of China. Snow even fell in parts of the northern Sahara in Algeria.
“It may seem like another Ice Age has arrived, but Antarctica, southern Africa, and the Horn of Africa have been warmer than usual. Australia is withering from an intense heatwave and a suburb of Sydney reached 47.3C on Sunday, the highest temperature there since 1939. The climate in Australia is becoming so warm that green turtles in the northern Barrier Reef, whose sex is determined by temperature, are largely female and a crash in their population is likely (News, January 9)”.
The truth is that an Ice Age is not imminent, Times said. “The world’s weather is like squeezing a balloon: when a cold snap grips one region, unusual warmth strikes somewhere else. Giant bulges in the jet stream brought unusually warm weather west of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska was bathed in mild air sweeping up from the tropics. On the other side of the looping jet stream, cold air flooded down from the Arctic as far south as Texas and Florida. Perhaps most significant of all is that the overall temperature of the world is 0.5C warmer than average.
In the 1970s, though, a small number of scientists were concerned about global cooling and the coming of an Ice Age after a run of cold winters. Those dire pronouncements failed to come true, but they have haunted climate scientists since, even though the trend has been for rising global temperatures from the 1980s onwards”.