White Desert, Egypt

The White Desert, known locally as Sahara el Beyda, lies about 45 kilometers north of the town of Farafra in Egypt's Western Desert, protected today as a national park covering roughly 300 square kilometers within a wider expanse of chalk and limestone terrain. Its landscape is built from layers of chalk and limestone laid down by an ancient sea during the Cretaceous period, between roughly 145 and 66 million years ago, later uplifted and exposed to the elements. Because chalk and limestone are relatively soft and porous, they erode readily under wind-driven sand and occasional rain, and centuries of that erosion have carved the rock into ventifacts, the wind-sculpted forms that give the desert its recognizable mushroom- and chicken-shaped outcrops of chalky white and cream stone standing out against the surrounding sand. This entity documents the White Desert specifically as a geological formation shaped by wind erosion of an ancient marine chalk and limestone deposit.