Apr 24, 2017
Emi Koussi
Tibesti, Chad, 1938
Wilfrid Thesiger
Pitt Rivers Museum
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Emi Koussi
Tibesti, Chad, 1938
Wilfrid Thesiger
Pitt Rivers Museum
Emi Koussi
Emi Koussi Top view of Emi Koussi Volcano, Chad, the highest of Africa’s Sahara region | GizemG Imagine standing at the base of a colossal mountain, rising like a sentinel from the endless sea of sand that is the Sahara Desert. This is Emi Koussi, the crown jewel of the Tibesti Mountains and the highest peak in the Sahara. Located in the northern Borkou Region of Chad, this magnificent volcano…
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this oblique photograph of one of the large volcanoes found in the central Sahara Desert. Emi Koussi is the dark crater and cone occupying most of the image.
NASA Earth Observatory
From NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day; February 5, 2018:
Emi Koussi and Wind Grooves
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this oblique photograph of one of the large volcanoes found in the central Sahara Desert. Emi Koussi is the dark crater and cone occupying most of the image. The dark lavas erupted from the volcano contrast with the surrounding light-toned sands and bedrock. For scale, the Emi Koussi crater is 12 to 15 kilometers wide (7.5 to 9.5 miles). Canyons, which were eroded by rivers and streams, radiate down the slopes. Click here for an earlier photo of the crater depression.
The Emi Koussi cone rises so high above the surrounding plains (2300 meters or 7,500 feet) that it deflects the dominant winds, which curve around the mountain mass. The lack of vegetation in the desert allows these persistent winds to erode long grooves in soft rocks—geologists call them yardangs. The grooves can be 30 meters deep and up to tens of kilometers long, and they reflect the dominant wind directions.
Emi Koussi is one of a line of volcanoes trending north in the range known as the Tibesti Mountains, which are often photographed by ISS crews. Travel across this countryside is known to be extremely difficult due to the challenging terrain.
Astronaut photograph ISS053-E-131330 was acquired on October 22, 2017, with a Nikon D4 digital camera using a 240 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 53 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Justin Wilkinson, Texas State University, JETS Contract at NASA-JSC. Instrument(s): ISS - Digital Camera
Another crater
A few days ago, we showed pictures of the feature on the left side of this photo taken from the International Space Station. The circle at the left is Aorounga impact crater in the desert of Chad (http://tmblr.co/Zyv2Js1zbQ5Qz), a 12 kilometer in diameter remnant of a space rock slamming into the land about 350 million years ago. The vertical stripes are yardangs, erosional features formed as the desert winds blow through this landscape.
When you zoom out from the impact crater, you find another feature with much younger craters a short distance to the northwest. The Emi Koussi volcano is the highest mountain in the Sahara region at over 3400 meters in elevation (11200 feet). Emi Koussi is a shield volcano, formed mostly from fluid lavas flowing down its slopes, with an occasional pyroclastic or explosive eruption in-between. Its summit holds three overlapping calderas, formed during large volcanic eruptions. The volcano is estimated to be less than 2 million years old, although no historic eruptions have been recorded.
The two features are unrelated, separated in time by hundreds of millions of years, but are caught here in same photograph.
-JBB
Image credit: NASA/EO https://flic.kr/p/bacUnR
Reference: http://bit.ly/1OZlfuM
From National Geographic Space Pictures This Week:
Gilded Mountains ESA
The sands of the Sahara appear like golden brush strokes around the Tibesti Mountains in a March 2012 satellite image recently released by the European Space Agency.
Located in Chad and Libya, the mountains' highest peak is Emi Koussi-pictured above as a circular structure in the lower-right portion of the dark area.
Lava flows can be seen extending from the westernmost volcano, Toussidé.