That’s snow cool!

This week, a thin blanket of pure-white snow covered earthy-red dunes of the Sahara Desert in the town of Ain Sefra in Algeria. The Monday event — captured in a series of incredible photographs — marked the first time snow had fallen there in nearly four decades.

It was a fleeting moment; the snow melted later that day.

The last time Ain Sefra, which is surrounded by the Atlas Mountains, saw snow was during a very brief snowfall in the winter of 1979, notes CNN. According to NPR, that snow fell for a grand total of 30 minutes.

It’s not what you’d expect in the Sahara. The world’s largest hot desert covers the bulk of Northern Africa and temperatures, in Fahrenheit, can reach the triple digits. But the mercury can also plummet to the snow-friendly 30s.

“Such moisture is as rare as the cool temperatures, given that just a few centimeters . . . of precipitation fall here in an entire year,” according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.