The toughest foot race on Earth kicks off on April 6th. It’s a gruelling multi-stage adventure through formidable landscape in one of the world’s most inhospitable climates – the Sahara desert in southern Morocco. The annual Marathon des Sables, better known as MdS, is now in its 30th consecutive year. Ready to lace up?
Posterity may end up migrating from place to place to find food like our nomadic ancestors did if we don’t get a hold of desertification and climate change. To make that easier for desert dwellers, Stephane Malka and Yachar Bouhaya propose the Green Machine – a massive city on tank treads that fertilizes the Sahara […]
With its oversized ears and soft brown eyes, the world’s smallest canid is also probably the cutest. But being adorable has turned out to be lethal for the Fennec Fox in Tunisia, where both locals and tourists are loving the species to death.
The European Space Agency (ESA) publishes satellite photos of Earth (and photos of space taken from Earth) in an incredible archive that’s updated weekly. Each image is paired with a brief explanation about what you’re looking at. Check out this selection – if the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) could take “selfies”, these would […]
In 1989, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 carrying 155 passengers and 15 crew members exploded over the Sahara Desert. 18 years later, family members built a memorial shaped like a plane in Niger, to which Libya contributed $170 million.
Severed goat heads, bloody and besieged by flies, lay side-by-side on a butcher’s slab. A dozen lethal serpents, coiled and poised to strike, wove back and forth before a snake charmer in the Marrakech souk.
Situated even deeper in the desert than Morocco and prone to locust swarms, Mauritania’s topography consists of the “mostly barren, flat plains of the Sahara” – as the CIA puts it. They’ve got very little water and less than half of one percent of the country’s land is arable. But they’ve got sun and they’ve […]
Mars is red and so is the Sahara desert, but the similarities between the two run deeper than that. Which is why the Austrian Space Forum (OEWF) dispatched a crew to Morocco, where they tested a series of communication, vehicular, wearable and other technologies that may eventually be deployed on the red planet, Gizmag reports. […]
A former sailor, Alain Thibault knows what it means to pine after fresh water, so he designed a portable desalination device that uses the sun’s power to make fresh drinking water. What’s more, he and the rest of his team have introduced the technology to Sahara nomads, who frequently struggle to find water that isn’t […]
Libya has long relied on its crude oil resources for revenue, but the country possesses a natural resource far more abundant and hardly tapped at all: sun. Nearly 90 percent of the country is comprised of sun-drenched desert or semi desert and only 1.03 percent of the land is arable. Match this with solar irradiation that […]
The Sahara. It’s the world’s hottest desert and almost as large as China or the United States, so travelers have good reason to be wary of wandering into it alone. But adventurer Tom Thumb has organized another retreat in 2013 for those who want to experience the Sahara. The Road Junky Sahara Retreat will be held […]
Desert locusts traveling southwest from Algeria and Libya threaten to decimate crops in Niger and Mali, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned on Wednesday. Since rebel forces killed Gaddafi in October last year, insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border has hampered pest control efforts, allowing locusts to swarm across […]
The Arab World’s superstar, Morocco’s longstanding exploitation of natural resources in the Western Sahara casts a dark shadow on the country’s reputation. Following unprecendented support (nearly 99%) for a draft constitution initiated by Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, the country is being hailed as a model for the rest of the Arab world. And so it […]
South African architects chose mud as the main building material for an $8.36 million Islamic Research Institute project in Timbuktu. Using the name Timbuktu in a phrase denotes a sense of something that is far, far away. And it is. Located near the Niger River Delta in Mali, Timbuktu is the gateway to the vast […]