With its low quantities of rain and soaring high temperatures, the Sahara Desert is often regarded as one of the most extreme and least habitable environments on Earth. While the Sahara was periodically much greener in the distant past, an ancient society living in a climate very similar to today’s found a way to harvest water in the seemingly dry Sahara—thriving until the water ran out.
With its low quantities of rain and soaring high temperatures, the Sahara Desert is often regarded as one of the most extreme and least habitable environments on Earth. While the Sahara was periodically much greener in the distant past, an ancient society living in a climate very similar to today’s found a way to harvest water in the seemingly dry Sahara—thriving until the water ran out.
New research that will be presented Monday, 16 Oct., at the Geological Society of America’s GSA Connects 2023 meeting describes how a series of serendipitous environmental factors allowed an ancient Saharan civilization, the Garamantian Empire, to extract groundwater hidden in the subsurface, sustaining the society for nearly a millennia until the water was depleted.
“Societies rise and fall at the pleasure of the physical system, such that there are special features that let humanity grow up there,” says Frank Schwartz, professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University and lead author of the research study.
Monsoon rains had transformed the Sahara into a comparatively lush environment between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, providing surface water resources and habitable environments for civilizations to thrive.
