Geography
The Azawagh refers to the dry structural basin, which once carried a northern tributary of the Niger river, the Azawagh river, known as Dallol Bosso further south. The river, which ran some 1,600 kilometres (990 mi) in prehistoric times, dried up after the Neolithic Subpluvial and created a basin of some 420,000 square kilometres (160,000 sq mi). Its valley, which geologists call the Iullemmeden Basin, is bordered by the Hoggar Mountains and their foothills in the north, the Aïr Mountains in the east, and the Adrar des Ifoghas in the west. The bedrock of the region is Cretaceous/Paleocene limestone and clay, which was cut by erosion and covered by aeolian sand in the Upper Pleistocene.
In ecological terms, the Azawagh basin is divided into, from north to south, a Saharian, a Sahelian and a northern Sudanese (referring to the geographic region) zone.
In Niger, Azawagh generally includes the towns of Abalagh (Abalak), In Tibaraden (Tchin-Tabaraden), Tiliya, In Gal and Tabalaq, a village where the sole lake of the region is located.
Read more about this topic: Azawagh And Ayr Region
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)