Dec 23, 2016 10:04 AM EST By Erwin Castro, UniversityHerald Reporter

It's Christmas time in the Sahara desert and the vast wasteland has been snowed earlier this week. The images come from NASA's Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus and it was the first snowfall recorded in the massive sun-scorching African desert in 37 years.

According to Yahoo, the snow-covered area depicted in the circulated images lies on the northern end of the Sahara desert, just near the Moroccan-Algerian border and outside the Algerian city of Ain Safra.

According to Science Alert, the photos from the City of Ain Sefra was taken by local amateur photographer Karim Bouchetata. The science-focused site also added that the captured images are genuine and not fake.

The Sahara Desert is the largest desert in the world with an area of more than 9,200,000 square kilometers. Its huge size makes it comparable to the total land area of the U.S. and Asia.

Sahara comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean coast, the Atlas Mountains and the Nile Valley in Egypt. The vast wasteland stretches hundreds of miles from the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. To the south, it is bounded by a belt of semi-arid tropical Savannah grasslands around the Egypt's Niger River valley and the Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Snopes.com, which made a scientific explanation about the story, the snowfall in the desert has something to do with Ain Sefra's unique location. Freezing temperatures are said to be a not unusual thing in the region, which is located between the desert and the Atlas Mountains. Temperatures in this place may exceed hot during the summer season and dip freezing in the months of December and January.

Snowfall like this one is not a strange thing on the African continent, according to NASA. Snowfall like this one regularly occurred in some parts of African, like the high peaks of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Amateur photographer Karim Boucheta has just happened to be in the right place to capture photos of the Saharan snowfall.

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