geosciences Review Sand Seas and Dune Fields of Egypt Olaf Bubenzer 1,* , Nabil S. Embabi 2 and Mahmoud M. Ashour 2 1 Im Neuenheimer Feld 348, Institute of Geography and Heidelberg Center for the Environment, Heidelberg University, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany 2 Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University, Cairo, El-Khalyfa El-Ma’moun Street Abbasya, Egypt;
[email protected] (N.S.E.);
[email protected] (M.M.A.) * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 22 August 2019; Accepted: 5 March 2020; Published: 10 March 2020 Abstract: The article reviews the state of knowledge about distribution, sizes, dynamics, and ages of all sand seas (N = 6) and dune fields (N = 10) in Egypt (1,001,450 km2). However, chronological data (Optically Stimulated Luminescence, Thermoluminescence), used in the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Research) dune database, only exists from three of the five sand seas located in the Western Desert of Egypt. The North Sinai Sand Sea and four of the ten dune fields are located near the Nile Valley, the delta or the coast and therefore changed drastically due to land reclamation during the last decades. Here, but also in the oases, their sands pose a risk for settlements and farmland. Our comprehensive investigations of satellite images and our field measurements show that nearly all terrestrial dune forms can be observed in Egypt. Longitudinal dunes and barchans are dominant. Sand seas cover about 23.8% (with an average sand coverage of 74.8%), dune fields about 4.4% (with an average sand coverage of 31.7%) of its territory.