Western Desert

The Libyan Desert, also known as the Western Desert, forms the northern and eastern part of the Sahara Desert and covers an area of approximately . The desert extends approximately 1100 km from east to west, and 1,000 km from north to south, in about the shape of a rectangle. The Libyan Desert covers eastern Libya, western Egypt and northwestern Sudan. Like most of the Sahara Desert, this desert is primarily sand and hamada or stony plain. The Libyan Desert is one of the harshest parts of the bigger Sahara Desert. This is one of the sunniest and driest places on Earth; many decades may easily pass without seeing any rainfall at all and the sky is always cloudless, clear and luminous. Extreme heat and extreme dryness both contribute to one of the highest levels of aridity found in the planet. Sand plains, dunes, ridges and some depressions (basins) typify the endorheic region, with no rivers draining into or out of the desert. The Gilf Kebir plateau reaches an altitude of just over , and along with the nearby massif of Jebel Uweinat is an exception to the uninterrupted territory of basement rocks covered by layers of horizontally bedded sediments, forming a massive sand plain, low plateaus and dunes. The desert features a striking diversity of landscapes including mountains such as Jebel Uweinat (), the Gilf Kebir plateau, and sand seas (see below). The Libyan Desert is barely populated apart from the modern settlements at oases of the lower Cyrenaica region in southeastern Libya. The indigenous population are Bisharin tribe, Mahas and Berber. In most of Upper Egypt, the desert is close to the Nile River, with a seasonal floodplain only a few kilometers wide between river and desert. Where the desert extends into Egypt, no longer in Libya, it is generally known as the Western Desert. The term Western Desert contrasts with the Eastern Desert, to the east of the Nile, which lies between the Nile and the Red Sea. North of the Gilf Kebir plateau, among the shallow peripheral dunes of the southern Great Sand Sea, is a field of Libyan desert glass. A specimen of the desert glass was used in a piece of Tutankhamun’s ancient jewelry.