SC - cooking class disappointment
Serian
serian at uswest.net
Thu Jun 22 07:56:48 PDT 2000
> What evidence do we have that the Sahara was still a grassland in Classical
> times? Or by "Antiquity" do you mean further back than say 100 AD?
this goes back to something I remember from school (we were
discussing climatology...)
Lybia and the North of Africa were called " the Breadbasket of Rome",
where where the gigantic "Grain ships" of the Romans loaded up.
I remember reading that at its peak North Africa supplied some 80%
of the Empires total cereal grain supply.
What apparently happened is that the Roman farming practices were
not efficient, and they never heard of crop rotation or letting a field go
fallow to replenish the soil. as the soil grew more impoverished, and
yeilds decreased, the Romans simply expanded the fields to makeup
the difference.
They effectively Agriculturally "stripmined" much of Noth Africa.
a very similar cause and effect to the Dust Bowl catastrophe of
Midwestern America 70 - 80 years ago.
The problem with this is that what they were farming on was actually
a thin layer of glacially deposited soil over what had been a HUGE
prehistoric desert. As the impoverished soil dried up and blew away,
it began to expose very large areas of the prehistoric desert.
Now the process of desertification occurs at the margins, and the
desert expands because the area of sand affects the atmosphere
over the deserted area, and as the moisture is sucked out of the
periphery, the dunes blow over and cover the soil, and the desert
grows until it is limited by a barrier, either climatological, such as the
monsoon rains of equatorial Africa, or physical, such as the
mountain ranges of the American Southwest, or the Mediterranean.
If you want to see this desertification in miniature, check out the
"Desert of Maine", which was a prehistoric Desert, and which
was "liberated" by sand quarrying in the 40's and 50's.
Brandu
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