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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.
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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.