today Picture of the day come from NASA Earth Observatory and presents Emi Koussi, one of the largest volcanoes in the Sahara Desert.

Around the dark central crater, which is 7.5 to 9.5 miles wide, are lava slopes from previous eruptions. The volcano’s cone rises to 7,500 feet, high enough to deflect strong winds. Emi Koussi in the Sahara Desert

This image was captured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station.

The desert encompasses much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region of the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudanese region of sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions, including Western Sahara, the Central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Air Mountains, the Tenere Desert, and the Libyan Desert.

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Through Rory arnold, Terre.com Editor-in-chief

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory