Formation and Geomorphology of the North-Western Negev Sand Dunes

The coastal plain of the northern Sinai Peninsula is a structural depression that borders several anticline mountains in the south. This coastal plain is covered by a dunefield in a wide area of 20–l80 km from north to south, and for 260 km from the Nile Delta in the west into the northern Negev Desert, where it terminates south of Beer Sheva (Fig. 3.1). The dunefield covers an area of about 12,000 km2. The Sinai and Negev form one geographical unit subdivided artificially by a political border. The dunefield is located in the northern boundary region of the Eastern Sahara subtropical desert, characterized by a long, hot and dry summer and a cool winter with a mean annual rainfall that is below 200 mm.

The political border between the Negev and Sinai has generated two distinctly different landscapes that can be delineated from space-based imagery. The Sinai side of the border tends to be bright and is constituted of bare sand dunes, whereas the Negev side is dark and constituted of vegetated dunes. This political border has thus created a bio-physical border caused by two distinctly different types of land use – grazing and wood-gathering activities in the Sinai, in contrast to almost no human-induced pressure in the Negev (Tsoar, Chap. 6, this volume). The Negev dunefield is triangular in shape, tapering eastwards because of the northern Negev anticline system that stretches from southwest to northeast and delimits the dunes in the southeast, and because of the storm winds blowing in this direction. The anticline of Har Keren is illustrated above the dunefield in Fig.3.1.