What we know today as the Sahara Desert was once a tropical region of heavy vegetation, abundant rainfall, and several large rivers. Scientists have discovered areas of the desert in which soils which once knew the cultivated influence of plow and farmer are now covered by a thin layer of sand. Researchers have also found an enormous reservoir of water below the parched desert area. The source of such a large deposit of water could only have been the heavy rains from the period of time before a fiery devastation consumed the lush vegetation of the area.
On December 25, 2007, it was confirmed by a French scientist that excavations at the area of Khamis Bani Sa’ad in Tehema district of Hodeidah province have yielded over a thousand rare archaeological pieces dating back to 300,000 B.C.E. Before a dramatic climate change, the inhabitants at that time had been fishermen and had domesticated a number of animals no longer to be found in the region, including a species of horse currently found only in Middle Asia.
The Red Chinese have conducted atomic tests near Lob Nor Lake in the Gobi Desert, which have left large patches of the area covered with vitreous sand. But the Gobi has a number of other areas of glassy sand which have been known for thousands of years.
Albion W. Hart, one of the first engineers to graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was assigned a project in the interior of Africa. While he and his men were traveling to an almost inaccessible region, they had first to cross a great expanse of desert. At the time, he was puzzled and quite unable to explain a large area of greenish glass which covered the sands as far as he could see.
"Later on during his life," wrote Margarethe Casson in Rocks and Minerals (No. 396, 1972), "he passed by the White Sands area after the first atomic explosion there, and he recognized the same type of silica fusion which he had seen fifty years earlier in the African desert."
In 1947, in the Euphrates valley of southern Iraq, where certain traditions place the Garden of Eden and where the ancient inhabitants of Sumer encountered the man-god Ea, exploratory digging unearthed a layer of fused, green glass. Archaeologists could not restrain themselves from noting the resemblance that the several-thousand-year-old fused glass bore to the desert floor at White Sands, New Mexico, after the first nuclear blasts in modem times had melted sand and rock.
In the United States, the Mohave Desert has large circular or polygonal areas that are coated with a hard substance very much like opaque glass.
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