“Geological palimpsest,” according to Open Geology, refers to “something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.” In the same way as ancient scribes used sharp blades to scrape away dried ink from sheets of parchment paper, this patch of Sahara is a time capsule layered with millions of years of historical lettering, inked by the shifting sands, the changing climates, the fluctuating geology and chemistry, among other things. The white sands of the desert, therefore, are like memorykeepers that store within them the memories of all the times gone by.
Sahara, the “hottest and one of the most inhospitable deserts on the planet,” is an archive of these geological memories, accumulated over time. When winds howl and lash the desert, they don’t just pick up grains of sand but also collect these past memories and deposit them on another patch in the vast, barren landscape. This particular place was once roamed by prehistoric animals and early humans on their way to the “great migration.” Then, about 12,000 years ago, during the Holocene African Humid Period, the Sahara was a giant lake, into a lush carpet of green vegetation. The moisture whiffing upwards from the desert leached the land into a dry, salty lakebed, which, today, people know as a desert.
The whiteness, according to NASA Earth Observatory, was a result of salt deposits accumulated for millions of years, a naturally occurring salty mix of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, and sodium sulfate. The ghoul’s dark eyes were craters and depressions etched deep into the ground by past eruptions, as well as cinder cones mounted into steep conical hills built around the volcanic vents that towered above the caldera floor. Trou au Natron, according to Space.com, is a French phrase that translates to “big hole.”
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