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Showing results for tags 'erg chebbi'.
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Day One ; Locality Five Sahara Desert 19th February 2019 An advert for Erfoud, the fossil capital of Morocco. But no time today, the sun is setting. "Tomorrow", Anouar promises me. And then suddenly we are out of the mountains and on the fringes of the mighty Sahara Desert, the largest hot desert in the world. (Antarctica and the Arctic are bigger, but cold deserts) Many think of the Sahara as being sand, but actually, only a fraction of it is composed of the ergs (sand and sand dunes), most of the desert is hamada - rock desert. It is often fossiliferous. In the west, around Agadir, it is often yellow and contains Cretaceous fossils such as ammonites, south of there, the whitish yellow rocks of the Palaeogene where whale fossils can be found in the desert, but in the east, such as here, the rocks are often grey or black , hence the term, "Black Sahara". They range in age from the Precambrian stromatolite reefs near Ouarzazate through to some Lower Carboniferous patches North of Merzouga near Erfoud. Here in Merzouga they are mostly Devonian in age. Also nodules and geodes containing crystals and desert roses and other strange geological features may be found. And those aren't mountains in the distance, those are sand dunes. The dunes of the mighty Erg Chebbi up to 150 metres high. But no time for collecting today. The sun was setting and it was time for dinner and a sleep. We were going to stay in a Berber desert nomad tent, but they're mostly a bit touristy and some have been forcibly shut down since i was there, but the temperature was going to be only i degree above freezing tonight, so, no thank you very much, a hotel it shall be.
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