Namib Desert

The Namib Desert is a coastal desert stretching along the Atlantic seaboard of Namibia, with smaller extensions into southern Angola and northwestern South Africa, and is regularly described as the world's oldest desert, having remained arid for tens of millions of years under the cooling influence of the offshore Benguela Current. It gave Namibia its name, from a word in the Nama language meaning roughly "vast place." The desert is famous for its towering red sand dunes, among the tallest on Earth, concentrated around Sossusvlei, colored by iron oxide in the sand and shifted continually by onshore winds. Rainfall is scarce and unreliable, so much of the desert's ecology instead depends on fog rolling in from the cold Atlantic, which specially adapted species exploit directly: the Namib desert beetle climbs to the crest of a dune and tilts its body to let fog condense and run down into its mouth, and Welwitschia mirabilis, a strange low, sprawling plant found only in this desert, can live well over a thousand years on fog moisture and little else. Other Namib specialists include the desert-adapted elephants and lions of the ephemeral river valleys that cross the dune sea and the sidewinding Namib sand viper.