Tibesti Mountains

21°N, 17°E

Central Sahara, northern Chad — shield-volcano range with hot springs

[from the public record]

21.0000, 17.0000 · view on OpenStreetMap →

What's documented

The Tibesti Mountains are a range of shield volcanoes in the central Sahara, in northern Chad. The highest peak, Emi Koussi, rises to 3,415 meters and is the highest point in the Sahara. The range contains active hot springs (with water temperatures around 37°C), lava fields, and extensive rock art predating the Toubou people who currently inhabit the region. The Tibesti rock-art record spans roughly 10,000 years; iconographies shift over time in ways the academic Saharan-prehistory literature continues to debate.

Notable & intriguing

Emi Koussi, the highest peak in the Sahara at 3,415 m, is a Pleistocene shield volcano with a summit caldera 12 km across. The caldera floor contains a smaller crater, Era Kohor, ~350 m deep, that was used in the 1960s as a Mars-surface analogue by NASA for early Mariner-mission instrument testing.

USGS, Volcanoes of the World; NASA Mariner program records.
Henri Lhote’s 1956–57 expeditions in the neighbouring Tassili n’Ajjer labeled certain large helmeted rock-art figures “Martians of Tassili”; the cosmonaut-interpretation has been widely rejected by Saharan prehistorians, but the figures themselves — large, bulb-headed, round-helmeted — remain real and visible in the rock.

Lhote, The Search for the Tassili Frescoes, 1959; rebuttals: Muzzolini, L’art rupestre préhistorique des massifs centraux sahariens, 1995.
Tibesti’s hot springs at Soborom and Yi-Yerra reach surface temperatures of ~37 °C and discharge sulfurous gases. The area is geologically active — the Sahara’s only active geothermal field.

Permenter & Oppenheimer, Bull. Volcanol., 2007.
The range was effectively closed to outside researchers for decades by the Chadian–Libyan border wars (1978–1987) and the Toubou rebellions; large parts of the rock-art corpus remain undocumented.

UNESCO field report, 2017.

Public-record items already documented about this subject. Folklore is labelled. Sources cited where the specificity warrants it.

Public-record imagery

ISS view of the Tibesti Mountains in the Sahara. Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · NASA Johnson Space Center / Kimiya Yui · Take

Emi Koussi — the highest peak in the Sahara, a Pleistocene shield volcano. Wikipedia Commons · Public domain · NASA · 2001

SPOT satellite imagery of the central Tibesti range. Wikipedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Cnes - Spot Image · 2006

ASTER satellite image of the Tibesti Range — the calderas of Emi Koussi and Tarso Toussidé are visible as dark concentric rings. The hot-spring fumaroles in the central range mark active geothermal venting; thermal anomalies are detectable from orbit. Wikimedia Commons · Public domain · NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team · Take

Referenced in the codex

1. We Are the Substrate The claim, the substrate-logic argument in three points, the Apkallu emerging from the deep waters to teach civilization. The long study, said plainly.
3. The Observers Above The third layer. The rectangle under the Vostok ice. The same rectangle in two other oceans. The man at Starbucks's "nearby galaxies" claim, taken seriously without being believed.