Erg Chech
The Erg Chech , also known as Irq el-Sheikh ( Arabic عرق شاش, DMG ʿIrq Šāš ), is an erg (sea of sand) in the southwest of the Algerian Sahara , which stretches across the border into the north of Mali and the east of Mauritania . The Algerian part is located in the provinces of Adrar and Bordj Badji Mokhtar .
The Erg Chech surrounds the El Eglab massif in an arc from east and south and reaches a width of around 200 km at around 1000 km in length. It forms long, parallel dune ridges that can be traced over hundreds of kilometers and are three to ten kilometers apart. The dune ridges tower over the gaps, which sometimes have no sand cover, by more than 100 m. In the north, the Erg Chech merges seamlessly into the Erg Iguidi and the Erg Er Raoui . In the east it borders on the Oued Messaoud and the Tanezrouft plain. Apart from the dunes piled up by the wind, the base level is relatively flat and its height tends to decrease with the distance to the El Eglab massif from about 350 m to 250 m. In northern Mali, the base of the terrain is in the central part at over 300 m. The highest points sometimes rise up to 500 m.
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Coordinates: 24 ° 35 ′ N , 2 ° 35 ′ W