| ESA | Earth Home | Missions | Data Products | Resources | Applications |
| 21-May-2012 |
 EO Data Access
|
|||
 |
How to Apply | ||
 |
|
|
|
| |
How to Access | ||
|
|||
| Services |
| Site Map |
|
| Frequently asked questions |
|
| Glossary |
|
| Credits |
|
| Terms of use |
|
| Contact us |
|
| Advanced Search |  |
Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, Algeria
Orbit 35547 Frame 3087 6 February 2002 10:3:17 GMT
Located in a strange lunar landscape of great geological interest, and inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, Tassili N'Ajjer National Park has one of the most important groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world. More than 15,000 drawings and engravings record the climatic changes, the animal migrations and the evolution of human life on the edge of the Sahara from 6000 BC to the first centuries of the present era.
The Tassili Plateau has geological formations of outstanding scenic interest that include eroded Ordovician and Devonian sandstones forming ''forests of rock'' (see lower part of image) and Precambrian chrystalline formation .
Bottom left image quadrant: the Tamadjert formations of the Central Sahara (to the right), and, to the North, oil wells.
Algeria being an oil and gas-producing country, a much wider concentration of oil wells and related installations is revealed by the ERS SAR instrument in Ahelleguen (see bottom left corner).
Upper part of the image: clearly distinguishable is the unique network of steep-sided valleys derived from a succession of wet and dry periods in paleoclimatic wet ages. Rivers (see the traces) were flowing along those valleys down from the Tassili to feed huge lakes in the region where the great Ergs are today.
Click on the circled areas above to see high-resolution details of this image.
Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry