The Sahara Desert grows by 48 kilometers every year
This relentless expansion has increased the desert’s size by ten percent in a century, prompting African nations to build a massive 8,000-kilometer wall of trees.
South of the Sahara, the Sahel region is slowly vanishing as the desert swallows nearly 50 kilometers of grassland annually. This process, known as desertification, is not just about sand dunes moving; it is the death of the soil itself. Since 1920, the world’s largest hot desert has expanded by about ten percent, an area larger than the entire state of Texas. It is driven by a cycle where rising temperatures bake the earth, killing the vegetation that would otherwise hold moisture and shield the ground from the wind.
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