DesertDemanding
The Grand Loop: Ennedi and the Lakes of Ounianga
Fifteen days on the track linking Chad's two World Heritage sites, out by the northern route and back through the Ouaddaï.
- Duration
- 15 days
- Group size
- 4–12
The Lakes of Ounianga
Ounianga Kébir
'Greater Ounianga': four lakes including Lake Yoa, the largest and deepest in the whole Sahara.
LakeUNESCO World Heritage 2012
- Elevation
- 380 m
- Coordinates
- 19.0667° N, 20.5167° E
- Lake
- The Lakes of Ounianga
History
The Ounianga Kébir group comprises Lake Yoa — 3.5 km² and 20 m deep, the largest in the basin — Lake Katam, Lake Oma, Lake Béver, Lake Midji and Lake Forodom.
Lake Yoa is a scientific object of the first rank. Its sediments, recovered by coring, form a continuous climate archive of more than 6,000 years: layer by layer they record the shift from green Sahara to today's desert. It is one of the few such sequences in the world, and it showed that the drying happened gradually, over millennia, rather than as an abrupt flip.
Lake Katam has a striking visual peculiarity: a narrow tongue of sand cuts it in two, its western half deep blue, the other an intense green — a colouring attributed to the alga Spirulina platensis.
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