Viewed from space , the westerly boundary of the Sahara Desert looks like another universe . Its abundance of red - tinged backbone wrick into a sea of dune that ebb out and flow with the winding , unabated by leaf and other earthly obstacles .
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station recently took this photograph while orbiting over southeastern Morocco , not far from the border with Algeria .
The beautiful image , of late share byNASA Earth Observatory , captures an area called Erg Chebbi , a sand sea that hatch an region of 18 by 9 kilometre ( 11.2 by 5.6 miles ) in North Africa .
The same aerial view of Erg Chebbi featuring some helpful labels.Image credit: ISS/NASA, annotated by NASA Earth Observatory
The stretch sand sail check legion features admit lead sand dune , also do it as pyramid dunes . These hill are form by flatus blowing masses of guts from multiple directions , create a dune with a central visor and several " ridges " that radiate outward , like a star shape or Pyramids of Egypt .
Although unremarkably colligate with the Sahara , whizz dunes can also be found in the Arabian Peninsula , China , and North America , as well as elsewhere in the Solar System , such as Mars and Saturn ’s moonshine Titan .
This type of sand dune can formsome of the tallest on Earth , hand up to 300 time ( 984 feet ) mellow in other part of the world like the Badain Jaran Desert in China .
Erg Chebbi may seem like an inhospitable landscape painting , but as ever , life finds a way . Towards the bottom of the dune complex , there ’s a magnanimous aquifer that support medal groves and the town of Marzouga .
At the top of thedunes , it ’s potential to just see a small-scale clump of camps . Traditionally , these eccentric of camps would have belong to the Indigenous Amazigh ( Berber ) mass , who lived nomadically in North Africa for millennia . Today , however , they are principally buy at by tourer who are keen toexperience the Sahara Desertwith their own eye .
