Namib Sand Sea

The Namib Sand Sea was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2013 and covers some 30,777 km² of the Namib Desert, on the Atlantic coast of Namibia, within the Namib-Naukluft National Park.

It is the only coastal desert on the planet with extensive dune fields shaped by fog. The cold Benguela Current, rising from the Antarctic along the coast, condenses the moisture in the air and produces a dense fog that penetrates tens of kilometres inland. That fog is the only significant source of water in a region where it hardly ever rains, and it has determined the evolution of the entire ecosystem.

The dunes are among the highest in the world, with crests exceeding three hundred metres at Sossusvlei, and their orange colour comes from the oxidation of the iron in sand carried thousands of kilometres by the Orange River and returned to land by wind and currents. The fauna has developed extraordinary adaptations for capturing water from the fog: tenebrionid beetles that stand head-down on the dune crests so that the droplets run into their mouths, geckos that lick their own eyes, and plants such as Welwitschia mirabilis, which can live more than a thousand years with only two leaves. The Namib is also the oldest desert in the world, with at least fifty-five million years of continuous aridity.