Sahara desert is a 3.5-million square mile wasteland that stretches 3,000 miles in length across 10 countries and an entire continent. Even though it has more than 20 lakes, only one of them contains water you can drink. The desert barely receives any rainfall and temperatures are frequently well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the fact that logic warns against ever going within 500 miles of the place, people not only live in the Sahara, they also visit it. Here are some of the craziest things that have happened in the desert.

The climate change

The really crazy thing about Sahara is that for several thousand millennia, it was actually wet and green. According to reports, a "sudden burst of monsoon rains" drenched the land and turned the Sahara into a place where people could not only live but raise livestock. Until between 7,300 and 5,500 years ago, the rains stopped, the desert dried up.

It snowed

According to CNN, in December 2016 a "freak snowfall" hit the town of Ain Sefra in Algeria for the first time in 37 years. The town is in the Sahara desert but it is 3,537 feet above sea level, which would put it in the snow zone in most other parts of the world. Then in 2017, another snowstorm hit the area. And in 2018 it happened again.

Trip of a lifetime

According to National Geographic, in 1815, an American ship called Commerce ran aground on the northwest African coast, which was quite possibly the world's worst place to be shipwrecked, mostly because of the desert nomads who were rumoured to eat any shipwrecked sailors they didn't sell into slavery. The crew tried to escape from those dangerous shores in a longboat, but ended up turning back, getting captured by Bedouin slave traders, and being forced to cross the Sahara. Fortunately, the ship's captain was quite resourceful, and he convinced a desert trader to purchase himself and four crew members, who agreed to take them north where they could be ransomed to their families.