Word: sahara
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...years she spent among a brilliant and damaged generation of poets. The Last Kings of Thule by Jean Malaurie. An Arctic adventurer in the tradition of Peary, Cook and Rasmussen poignantly describes the lives of Greenland's Eskimo nomads as the 20th century encroaches on their Sahara of ice and snow...
...November 1981. That mission had to be cut from 124 hr. to 54 hr. because of a faulty fuel cell, but before aborting the flight, the astronauts were able to complete an experiment with the ship's radar equipment. They took a 50-km-wide scan of the Sahara from the shuttle. Radar waves generally penetrate only a few centimeters of the earth, since the beams are dissipated by moisture in the surface of land. But in the dry Sahara, the radar waves were able to pierce to depths of five meters, reflecting from bedrock...
...signals were processed through image-enhancing computer techniques. The resulting X ray-like pictures of the Sahara's subsurface were then analyzed by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Arizona, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Egyptian Geological Survey and Mining Authority. The images of the area, says U.S.G.S. Research Geologist Carol Breed, "showed us a topography that could only have been buried. There was no trace of it on the surface." Marvels the head of the eight-member group interpreting the pictures, John F. McCauley of the U.S.G.S.: "We were able...
...find confirms that the region was once wet enough to support plants, animals and man, which scientists have long suspected. The Sahara originally dried out 2 million years ago, as the earth slipped into an Ice Age, but brief rainy periods occurred about 200,000, 60,000 and 10,000 years ago. Researchers who have ventured into south-central Egypt have found artifacts of human occupation. The U.S.Egyptian team that visited last September found the area so dry that cardboard boxes, cigarette papers and tracks left by the British army during World War II were perfectly preserved. Seeking signs...
Space officials are so excited by the radar technique that a follow-up mission for more sophisticated radar imaging has been approved for a shuttle flight in August 1984. Says J.P.L.'s Charles Elachi: "The plan is to concentrate and get much more coverage of the Sahara region." There is even talk of more radar missions to other planets. Radar pictures, which have already revealed some of the secrets under the clouds of Venus, may help scientists learn how planets developed. First choice would be Mars. The arid red planet's surface is etched with channels remarkably similar...