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Heart in Mauritania
Credit: ESA
Especially for Valentine's Day,
Envisat picks out a heart from the
arid landscape of Africa's
Sahara. This is a multi-temporal Advanced
Synthetic Aperture
Radar (ASAR) image of the central coast of
Mauritania in West
Africa, perched on the edge of the Sahara Desert.
The
heart-shaped image seen at the centre of the picture is actually
a land
feature called the Sebkha Te-n-Dghamcha – a large
depression covering
an area about 70 by 50 km across. 'Sebkha'
is the Arabic for dry
lake, and it was indeed once covered by
water – the area's
lowest point is more than three metres
below sea level.
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