what is the significance of the sahara desert
the largest hot desert
title: Sahara text: Sahara The Sahara (, ; , ', 'the Great Desert') is the largest hot desert and the third largest desert in the world after Antarctica and the Arctic. Its area of is comparable to the area of China or the United States. The name 'Sahara' is derived from a dialectal Arabic word for "desert", ' ( ). The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in title: Sahara text: government, who, according to Keenan, "documented a space of intercultural mediation," contributing much to preserving the indigenous cultural identities in the region. Sahara The Sahara (, ; , ', 'the Great Desert') is the largest hot desert and the third largest desert in the world after Antarctica and the Arctic. Its area of is comparable to the area of China or the United States. The name 'Sahara' is derived from a dialectal Arabic word for "desert", ' ( ). The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the title: Sahara text: Earth's axis as it rotates around the sun, which change the location of the North African Monsoon. It is next expected to become green in about 15,000 years (17,000 AD). There is a suggestion that the last time that the Sahara was converted from savanna to desert it was partially due to overgrazing by the cattle of the local population. The Sahara covers large parts of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia. It covers , amounting to 31% of Africa. If all areas with a mean annual precipitation of less than 250 mm were title: Sahara text: is linked to a marked decline in the scale of the Nile floods between 2700 and 2100 BCE. The Sahara comprises several distinct ecoregions. With their variations in temperature, rainfall, elevation, and soil, these regions harbor distinct communities of plants and animals. The Atlantic coastal desert is a narrow strip along the Atlantic coast where fog generated offshore by the cool Canary Current provides sufficient moisture to sustain a variety of lichens, succulents, and shrubs. It covers an area of in the south of Morocco and Mauritania. The North Saharan steppe and woodlands is along the northern desert, next to title: Sahara text: low, unreliable, highly erratic rainfall; extremely high sunshine duration values; high temperatures year-round; negligible rates of relative humidity; a significant diurnal temperature variation; and extremely high levels of potential evaporation which are the highest recorded worldwide. The sky is usually clear above the desert and the sunshine duration is extremely high everywhere in the Sahara. Most of the desert has more than 3,600 h of bright sunshine annually or over 82% of the time, and a wide area in the eastern part experiences in excess of 4,000 h of bright sunshine a year or over 91% of the time. The