Scientists are predicting that water and life may slowly reclaim the world's most torturous deserts despite prediction of doom from some quarters.
According to a report by BBC News, the evidence is limited and definitive conclusions are impossible to reach, but recent satellite pictures of North Africa seem to show areas of the Sahara in retreat.
It could be that an increase in rainfall has caused this effect.
The Sahara is experiencing a shift from dryer to wetter conditions, according to Farouk el-Baz, director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University.
"It's not greening yet. But the desert expands and shrinks in relation to the amount of energy that is received by the Earth from the Sun, and this over many thousands of years," el-Baz told the BBC World Service.
"The heating of the Earth would result in more evaporation of the oceans, in turn resulting in more rainfall," he said.
Droughts over the preceding decades have had the effect of driving nomadic people and rural farmers into the towns and cities.
Such movement of people suggests weather patterns are becoming dryer and harsher.