Scientists discover Sahara Desert contained the world's largest lake named Mega Chad until it evaporated in just a few hundred years
An enormous lake called Mega Chad in what is now the Sahara desert took just a couple of hundred years to shrink to a fraction of its size, British scientists have found.
Mega Chad was once the biggest freshwater lake on earth covering 139,000 sq miles (360,000 sq km) of Central Africa – and rapidly shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former size 1,000 years ago.
The discovery sheds light on how the Amazon rain forest grows – because dust from the remains of the dried-up lake blows across the Atlantic to help fertilise the jungle.
Scientists discover Sahara Desert contained the world’s largest lake
Mega Chad was the biggest freshwater lake on earth covering 139,000 sq miles (360,000 sq km) of Central Africa - and rapidly shrunk to a tiny fraction of its former size 1,000 years ago.
