The culprit turns the Sahara prairies into arid deserts

The Sahara moved from lush grasslands to dry deserts as the rain belt in this area gradually moved north to the Mediterranean.

About 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a vast grassland that was often flooded with tropical rain. Today, the Sahara desert is one of the driest areas on Earth, according to UPI.

The research team at Texas A&M University and Yale University, USA, conducted research to find out what caused the climate change in the Sahara desert. They built a rain pattern in the Toan Tan in the Quaternary, in contrast to today's rain pattern for comparison.

The Sahara Desert is one of the driest places on Earth.(Photo: Texas A&M University).

The analysis of the scientists provides new insights into the Hadley circulation circle , the airflow cycle going up in the equatorial area and down in the subtropics. The Hadley circulation circle acts on everything from trade winds, tropical rain belts, jet streams and storms.

"Our model explains the formation of tropical rain belts and their relationship to the weather elsewhere in the world through the Hadley circulation," said Robert Korty, professor of sciences. Atmospheric learning at Texas A & M University, said.

According to a study published on November 21 in the journal Nature Geoscience, over time, the rain belt once provided moderate rainfall to the Sahara gradually moved north toward the Mediterranean.

"The reason that the tropical rain belt travels so far north of the equator is still a mystery. Our research shows that a large shift in precipitation can occur in one part of the gender, even if the rain belt does not move much away, " Korty said.

Korty and his colleague William Boos at Yale University say that the movement of the rain belt is not enough to explain the climate change in Sahara. Instead, the total precipitation drops more likely to create a climate feedback loop, thereby triggering more dramatic changes in soil and atmosphere.