Exceptional Snow Blizzard Covers The Sahara Desert

Snow in the Sahara Desert is definitely not a scene you are used to seeing every winter. Yet for the third time in the last 40 years, it’s snowing in the African desert.

The polar swing which affected a large portion of the US and Spain apparently arrived in North Africa too.

Namely, the Sahara Desert replaced its ordinary sand dunes with white snow coat and this event was stunning for many people.

Image Credit: Zineddine Hashas / Geoff Robinson

The unusual landscape appeared in the town of Aïn Séfra, also famous as ‘the desert gate’ located in northwestern Algeria.

According to the newspaper Express, this area, which locates around 1,080 meters above sea level, there was a snow cover thick about 40 centimeters.

“We were really surprised when we woke up and saw snow,” said photographer Karim Bouchetata.

Image Credit: Zineddine Hashas / Geoff Robinson

This is the third snow in the north of the Sahara desert counting since February 18, 1979. The second one was last year in December when another snow blizzard converted the dry desert into an icy scenery.

Meteorologists predicted that more areas in the area could experience cold weather and snow up to 15 centimeters.

Image Credit: Zineddine Hashas / Geoff Robinson

The Sahara desert is the largest warm desert in the world and the third largest after Antarctica and the Arctic.

It has over 9,065,000 km2 of surface area and it embraces the biggest part of North Africa.

This desert reaches the Red Sea and parts of the Mediterranean Sea’s coast and spreads to the Atlantic Ocean.

To the south, it borders with the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savannah that compose the regions that cover the north of sub-Saharan Africa.

The climate of the Sahara has experienced tremendous changes in the course of the time. In other words, the temperatures were varying from wet to dry for the last hundreds of thousands of years.

Right now, we are undergoing a dry period. However, the Sahara desert is anticipated to become a green landscape in about 15,000 years.