Tag Archives: Study in Mauritania

The borders of Mauritania are drawn along almost everywhere conventional lines that cross arid and almost desert regions. The territory represents a transitional area between white northwestern Africa, the Maghreb and black Africa; consequently Mauritania is struggling to find its own precise cultural identity. In the 1950s, before independence (proclaimed in 1960), Mauritania appeared only as a piece of the Sahara overlooking the Atlantic, a marginal political entity in the world panorama, an area traveled only by nomads. At the beginning of the century. XXI, the country ranks among those who are trying most tenaciously to get out of the situation of poverty that still grips a large part of the population, despite the fact that the country still suffers from strong political instability, as evidenced by the repeated coups d’etat, and a latent contrast between the Arab populations and the rest of the residents. According to COUNTRYAAH, Mauritania is a nation in Western Africa, the capital city of which is Nouakchott. The latest population of Mauritania is 4,649,669. REMZFAMILY: Lists and descriptions of main religions and beliefs in Mauritania, including religion demographics and statistics on Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.
GEOGRAPHY
The geomorphological features of the Mauritanian territory are rather simple: horizontal lines prevail in the landscape, due to the geological events that have affected the vast region since the Precambrian (Archaeozoic era). A succession of epyrogenic movements caused alternately the lifting of the Precambrian plate, consisting mainly of gneiss and granite, and its submergence under the Cambrian and Silurian seas, which left powerful sedimentary formations, mainly sandstones, on the bottom. With the end of the Carboniferous, the definitive emergence of the region began, which ended only in the Pleistocene and it was accompanied neither by orogenetic movements nor by lava effusions. The morphology of the Mauritanian territory is therefore almost exclusively due to the differentiated erosion of meteoric agents on more or less resistant geological layers, which gave rise to a series of rocky plateaus, the hamada (Dahar Adrâr, Dahar Tichit) of different heights and extension, engraved at the edges by steep escarpments and surmounted towards the W by isolated residual reliefs (Inselberge), which constitute the intermediate phase of an erosive process already completed elsewhere and highlighted by the recent sandy or pebbly coverings. The large western strip is flat, which pushes its sandy surfaces up to the Atlantic, which Mauritania overlooks for approx. 750 km, between the Râs Nouâdhibou (White Cape) and the mouth of the Senegal River, with a flat and imposing coast. § With the exception of the Senegal river, of which only the right bank of the middle and lower course belongs to Mauritania, the country has the typical Saharan hydrography, areic or endorheic, i.e. without rivers and with short streams (uidian) that are formed at the time of the rains and that are lost in the sands or go to die in temporary internal basins (called grara if short-lived, guelta if they remain for a few months) and with very variable contours from one season to another. Groundwater is also scarce throughout the Saharan region. The areas rich in underground water line up at the base of the plateaus, where they have allowed the formation of vast oases. § The astronomical position of Mauritania, crossed by the Tropic of Cancer, and the scarce maritime influences for a large part of the territory determine markedly continental climatic conditions. The climate is conditioned by the northern, Saharan air masses such as harmattan, which expires mainly in the winter months, accentuating the aridity of the dry season; in summer, on the other hand, due to the N shift of the equatorial cyclonic belt, the region is affected by more humid equatorial winds of the monsoon type, the influence of which, however, is noticeable only in the southern belt, along the Senegal river, where there is an alternation of a hotter and drier season, from December to March, with another cooler and more humid (khoreef), from June to September, with rainfall that exceptionally touches 350-400 mm per year. Elsewhere the rains are always less than 250 mm, lowering to the Saharan values. Temperatures are everywhere quite high, with averages around 28-30 ºC, although slightly mitigated on the coast; in the interior there may be marked daily temperature variations, even of the order of 40-50 ºC.