What is the name of the desert covering much of northern Africa?

The Sahara Desert is the vast desert covering much of northern Africa.

The Sahara extends across roughly 9.2 million square kilometres, making it the largest hot desert in the world. It stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east and reaches from the Mediterranean coast southward toward the Sahel. Eleven countries contain parts of the desert, including Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Tunisia, along with the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

The landscape is not only sand dunes. Rocky plateaus, gravel plains, mountains, salt flats, and oases occupy much of the region. The highest point is Emi Koussi, a volcanic mountain in Chad that rises to about 3,445 metres.

The Sahara was considerably wetter during parts of the early and middle Holocene, when lakes, grasslands, and human communities occupied areas that are now arid. This shift is called the African humid period and helped shape the region’s archaeology and climate history.