The Sahara is the world’s largest desert and dust source with significant impacts on trans-Atlantic terrestrial and large-scale marine ecosystems. Remote Saharan dust influences the earth’s radiation budget and tropical North Atlantic ocean-atmosphere temperature variability that might even attenuate Hurricane activity. In a new research study an international team of geoscientists reconstructed the history of Saharan dust storms during the last 12.000 years. The researchers identified several millennial-scale phases of enhanced Saharan dust supplies during the transition of the former “green Sahara” to the present-day hyper-arid desert. The results were currently published in the geoscientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews.