Snow Falls in the Sahara

The Sahara is the standard example of somewhere hot. It is where you send an imaginary person who has complained about the cold. So the photographs cause trouble: red-orange dunes with snow lying in the troughs between them, drifted into the ripples like icing pressed into a mould.

The town of Ain Sefra in northern Algeria sits about a thousand metres up, at the desert's edge, and it has now been snowed on repeatedly — once in 1979, then again in 2016, 2018 and 2021, with a further dusting since. It is not a freak of a single afternoon. It is becoming, quietly, a thing that town expects every few winters.

The mechanism is unremarkable once you stop thinking of desert as a synonym for hot. Deserts are defined by dryness, not warmth, and altitude does the rest: cold air rolls down off the Atlas mountains, meets just enough moisture, and there is your snow. The same sand that hit fifty degrees in July can sit under white powder in January.

It rarely lasts a day. The sun comes up, the sand takes back its colour, and by afternoon there is no evidence except a great many photographs which, every single time, half the internet insists have been faked.