As little as 6,000 years ago, the vast Sahara Desert was covered in grassland that received plenty of rainfall, but shifts in the world's weather patterns abruptly transformed the vegetated region into some of the driest land on Earth. A Texas A&M university researcher is trying to uncover the clues responsible for this enormous climate transformation – and the findings could lead to better rainfall predictions worldwide.
Robert Korty, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, along with colleague William Boos of Yale University, have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.
The two researchers have looked into precipitation patterns of the Holocene era and compared them with present-day movements of the intertropical convergence zone, a large region of intense tropical rainfall. Using computer models and other data, the researchers found links to rainfall patterns thousands of years ago.
"The framework we developed helps us understand why the heaviest tropical rain belts set up where they do," Korty explains.
"Tropical rain belts are tied to what happens elsewhere in the world through the Hadley circulation, but it won't predict changes elsewhere directly, as the chain of events is very complex. But it is a step toward that goal."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by datapharmer on Saturday December 03 2016, @02:57PM
This is nothing mind-blowing. As an anthropologist I can answer you definitively: people. People caused this and people will make more deserts. If you follow the history of people our oldest civilizations are all in what were lush forests and what are now deserts. From Egypt and Mesopotamia to Lesvos Greece to Easter Island to the British Isles to even more recently areas of North Korea, Northeastern Brazil and the U.S. Southwest (the Colorado river delta was once lush and green, but all the water was diverted to cities so it now dries up before reaching the ocean). Every place people go they chop down the forests, exploit the soils and eventually end up with a desert.