Sandy Sculptures in Morocco’s Erg Chebbi | International Space Station

Sandy Sculptures in Morocco’s Erg Chebbi | International Space Station

Windswept sand formations known as star dunes, or pyramid dunes, are a distinctive feature of the Sahara Desert in northern Africa. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photograph while orbiting over northern Africa. The image shows a dune field known as Erg Chebbi, located in southeastern Morocco, near the border with Algeria and northeast of the Little Atlas mountain range. This erg, a wide sandy area covered with dunes, lies in the northwestern region of the Sahara Desert.

Dunes are created when the wind transports and deposits fine sand, forming mounds of sediment. The dunes in this photo display multiple smooth sides, known as slip faces, where sand has cascaded down from the peak. The windward side, located on the opposite side from the slip face, is where the wind blows material upward. The dune continues to grow vertically as long as sediment is available and the wind is strong enough to transport it upward. The large dunes crossing the center of the image, characterized by sharp multidirectional ridges, are star dunes. These are also known as pyramid dunes and are a distinctive feature of the Sahara.

The town of Marzouga and nearby communities appear at the bottom right of the image. A large, natural aquifer supports palm groves as well as crops in this arid region. Agricultural fields are the long linear features visible in the image’s bottom right corner.

Tourism provides an additional source of income for the communities due to their proximity to the Erg Chebbi dunes. Road lines, mainly created by off-road vehicles, are visible at the top of the image. Tent camps are located on the east side of the dune field, visible from space as small clusters of light-colored rectangular shapes. These camps are mostly used by tourists, though some of them could represent settlements of the Indigenous Amazigh (Berber) peoples.

Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to the east, and the disputed territory of Western Sahara to the south.

The Sahara is the largest hot desert and the third largest desert in the world after Antarctica and the Arctic. Its area of 9,200,000 square kilometers (3,600,000 sq mi) is comparable to the area of China or the United States. The name 'Sahara' is derived from a dialectal Arabic word for "desert", ṣaḥra (صَحَارَى).

The Sahara covers much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan Region of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Astronaut photograph ISS070-E-105480 was acquired on December 21, 2023, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a focal length of 1,200 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at Johnson Space Center.

Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)
Article Credit: Wilfredo García López/Jacobs-JETS II Contract/NASA-JSC
Image Date: Dec. 21, 2023
Release Date: Nov. 10, 2024

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