Heart in Mauritania

Credit: Credit: ESA, Posted on: Sunday, 15 February 2004, 06:00 CST Download full size image

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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