Namib Sand Sea

Fog rolls off the cold Atlantic and waters a desert. In the Namib Sand Sea — over three million hectares of dunes where an ancient, semi-consolidated system underlies a younger active one — that marine fog is the main source of moisture, sustaining endemic beetles, reptiles and mammals found nowhere else. Sand carried from the distant hinterland by river, current and wind built this landscape of gravel plains, inselbergs and towering dunes. UNESCO inscribed it in 2013.