Southern Africa Dunes Predicted to Destabilize

Global warming could drastically alter Africa’s southern sand dunes, expanding the desert and destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people before 2100, new research warns.

Large parts of interior southern Africa are made up of stabilized sand dunes. They are at least partially covered in vegetation and support a population of herders and farmers. But research in the current issue of the journal Nature predicts widespread reactivation of these dunes as average rainfall declines and wind strengths pick up -- conditions last seen 14,000 to 16,000 years ago.