A pioneering study has shed new light on North African humid periods that have occurred over the past 800,000 years and explains why the Sahara Desert was periodically green.
, showed periodic wet phases in the Sahara were driven by changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun and were suppressed during the ice ages.
“Our study is one of the first climate modelling studies to simulate the African Humid Periods with comparable magnitude to what the palaeoclimate observations indicate, revealing why and when these events occurred.” A major barrier to understanding these events is that the majority of climate models have been unable to simulate the amplitude of these humid periods, so the specific mechanisms driving them have remained uncertain.
The findings also show the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when there were large glacial ice sheets covering much of the high latitudes. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere and suppressed the tendency for the African monsoon system to expand. This highlights a major teleconnection between these distant regions, which may have restricted the dispersal of species, including humans, out of Africa during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
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