The Air Mountains in the Sahara Desert Today Picture of the day of NASA Earth Observatory features the Sahara Desert in northern Niger, where the Air Mountains rise sharply from the sand.

The mountain range has volcanic peaks and deep valleys, and the region is home to a variety of wildlife and fauna that have not survived in other parts of the Sahara.

The formation of the Air Mountains dates back to the oldest of Earth’s eons – the Precambrian era.

This image was captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite on October 31, 2018. Air mountains in the Saharan desert

The Sahara (/səˈhɑːrə/, /səˈhærə/; Arabic: الصحراء الكبرى, aṣ-ṣaḥrāʼ al-kubrá, “the greatest desert”) is a desert located on the African continent. It is the largest hot desert in the world and the third largest desert after Antarctica and the Arctic. Its area of ​​9,200,000 square kilometers (3,600,000 sq mi)[2] is comparable to the area of ​​China or the United States. The name “Sahara” is derived from a dialectal Arabic word for “desert”
The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and from 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 semi-arid tropical savannah belt around the Niger River valley and the Sudan region of sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions including: Western Sahara, Central Ahaggar Mountains, Tibesti Mountains, Air Mountains, Ténéré Desert and Libyan Desert.

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By Chrissy Sexon, Terre.com Personal editor

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory