Nouakchott, Mauritania
Deserts
Not too long ago, Nouakchott, Mauritania, was a small fishing town. It became the country’s capital in 1958, shortly before Mauritania became independent. The town rapidly bloomed into a huge metropolis.
During a long series of drought years in the 1970s, thousands of rural families moved to Nouakchott in search of a better life. Refugees displaced by the Western Sahara War, which started in the mid-1970s, added to the city’s growth.
From small fishing town to rapidly expanding national capital, Nouakchott is surrounded by shifting sand dunes from the north and east, threatened by sea level rise from the west, and facing rising salty groundwater from below. Sand, salt, and water simultaneously threaten to damage the city from all sides. That’s why monitoring the region with Earth-observing satellites will be important for its future.
Location
Sep. 25, 1973, Landsat 1 (path/row 220/48) — Nouakchott, Mauritania
Aug. 13, 1995, Landsat 5 (path/row 205/47) — Nouakchott, Mauritania
July 30, 2019, Landsat 8 (path/row 205/47) — Nouakchott, Mauritania
Nouakchott, Mauritania Additional Imagery & Stories
City Growth
Nouakchott was a small fishing village for hundreds of years. As recently as 1950, it had only about 200 residents. Drought throughout the 1970s broug...
New Airport
Nouakchott’s airport is visible as the straight diagonal line near the city’s center in the images in the other subsections. Over the time series of i...
Re-greening
Nouakchott is surrounded by a succession of sand dune belts, some of which are highly mobile and can reach 20 m high. North and east of the city, a gr...
References
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Braimah, A., 2015, Nouakchott, Mauritania (1659- ): Blackpast.org, accessed on September 20, 2016, at http://www.blackpast.org/gah/nouakchott-mauritania-1960.
CILSS, 2016, Nouakchott—Urbanization at the Gates of the Desert: in Landscapes of West Africa—A Window on a Changing World. U.S. Geological Survey EROS, pp. 154–155. (Also available online at https://eros.usgs.gov/westafrica/.)
Demographia, 2016, Demographia World Urban Areas—Built-Up Urban Areas or World Agglomerations (12th ed.): Belleville, Ill., Demographia, 110p., accessed on September 20, 2016, at http://demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf.
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IRIN, 2013, Mauritania reeling from unprecedented flooding: IRIN, accessed on November 3, 2016, at http://www.irinnews.org/news/2013/09/30.
Les Ateliers, 2014, Nouakchott—Our Challenge Is Our Future—The Adaptation and Mutation of a Vulnerable City: Les Ateliers, International Workshop for Urban Planning and Development—Nouakchott, Mauritania, from April 26th to May 11th, 2014, accessed on September 20, 2016, at https://www.ateliers.org/media/workshop/documents/topic_document_nouakchott.pdf.
Mohamed, M.O., and N’Dao, Z., [n.d.], Fighting Desertification in Mauritania—Remedial Techniques for Mechanical Stabilisation and Biological Dune Fixation, in Mosquera-Losada, M.R., Fernández-Lorenzo, J.L., and Rigueiro-Rodriguez, A., eds., Agroforestry Systems as a Technique for Sustainable Land Management: AECID, p. 273-283. Accessed on September 20, 2016, at http://www.agroforestry.eu/sites/default/files/pub/docs/af_aecid_en.pdf.
Senhoury, A., Niang, A., Diouf, B., and Thomas, Y.-F., 2016, Managing Flood Risks Using Nature-Based Solutions in Nouakchitt, Mauritania, in Renaud, F.G., Sudmeier-Rieux, K., Estrella, M., and Nehren, U., eds., Ecosystem-Based Disaster Risk Reduction and Adaptation in Practice: Switzerland, Springer, p. 435-456.
Smith, A.D., 2016, ‘The best solution? Move the Mauritanian capital’—water on the rise in Nouakchott: The Guardian, accessed on September 20, 2016, at https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jul/25/the-best-solution-move-the-mauritanian-capital-water-on-the-rise-in-nouakchott.