Snow in the Sahara, a rare phenomenon

In the winter it snows in many points of the planet, but see how snowdrops at one of the hottest places on the planet is an exceptional phenomenon. Nevertheless, the data we have reveal that during last years, see how it snows in the Sahara is each time more usual. Each time we can see more snow in the Sahara

The Sahara is the biggest sand desert on the planet. It occupies an extension of more than 8,5 million square kilometers in North-Africa and it can show of of having the most elevated temperature on the planet. Even so, during last years it has experienced one of the less awaited situations: snow has arrived at its surface, leaving some images in which we can see that the hot sand and the cold ice melt together. This rare phenomenon is one of the effects of climate change on our planet.

The last snowfall, in January 2021, took place in the city of Ain Sefra, located in the north-west of Algeria. This city is also known as “the entrance door to the desert”, and the city is located at an altitude of 1000 meters above sea level. The city is surrounded by the Atlas mountains. This geographic situation provokes that this zone to have the relatively lowest temperatures of the rest of the Sahara. The temperatures in this city of the Sahara arrive at the 38Cº in the summer, while during winter the average temperatures are a little smoother, with about 14Cº.

However, the storm from America, that arrived in Africa, gave place to lower temperatures than normal, temperatures that dropped to 3Cº during the night, temperatures that aren’t very usual in Algeria. This, added to the snow that fell in this pat of the Sahara during the snowfall had as a result that during some days we could see dunes of the Sahara covered up with a snow cape, which is a really beautiful and rare image of the zone.

However, this isn’t the first time that it snows in the Sahara in the last forty years. The biggest snowfall that has taken place in the area was in the year 1979, the date in which even the traffic had to be cut for the snow that recovered the roads and the houses of the zone. The other 3 snowfalls have been produced in 2017, when it arrived to fall up to 1 meter of snow, in 2018, and in January of this 2021. The pattern of snowfalls in the Sahara, as we see, is each time more usual.

Apart from the Sahara, we can think of the other two biggest deserts of the world, where we can see that they have also been suffering big changes in the last years. While in the Sahara we are seeing how it snows with each time more frequency, the Antarctic and the Arctic see each time more habitual how the melting of the ice finishes with important zones, which is a clear demonstration that something is changing in our planet.


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