The recent decades-long drought that killed 100,000 people in Africa’s Sahel may be a small foretaste of monstrous “mega-droughts” that could grip the region as global climate change worsens, scientists reported April 16.
Droughts, some lasting for centuries, are part of the normal pattern in sub-Saharan Africa. But the added stress of a warming world will make these dry periods more severe and more difficult for the people who live there, the scientists said.
“Clearly, much of West Africa is already on the edge of sustainability, and the situation could become much more dire in the future with increased global warming,” said University of Arizona climatologist Jonathan Overpeck, a co-author of the study published in the journal Science.
Read Also
Farming Smarter receives financial boost from Alberta government for potato research
Farming Smarter near Lethbridge got a boost to its research equipment, thanks to the Alberta government’s increase in funding for research associations.
The Sahel is an area between the Sahara Desert and the wetter parts of equatorial Africa that stretches across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east.
Overpeck and his colleagues studied sediments beneath Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana that gave an almost year-by-year record of droughts in the area going back 3,000 years. Until now, the instrumental climate record in this region stretched back only 100 years or so.
The researchers found a pattern of decades-long droughts like the one that began in the Sahel in the 1960s that killed at least 100,000 people, as well as centuries-long “mega-droughts” throughout this long period, with the most recent lasting from 1400 to 1750.
The scientists also described signs of submerged forests that grew around the lake when it dried up for hundreds of years.
During the recent Sahel drought, the lake’s water level dropped perhaps five metres. By contrast, during mega-droughts the level fell by as much as 30 metres.
“What’s disconcerting about this record is that it suggests that the most recent drought was relatively minor in the context of the West African drought history,” said Timothy Shanahan of the University of Texas, a co-author of the study.
“We might actually proceed into the future… we could cross a threshold driving the (climate) system into one of those big droughts without even knowing it’s coming,” Overpeck said.
Temperatures in this region are expected to rise by 5 to 10F (2.77 to 5.55C) this century, the scientists said.
