15 questions · Geography
A third of the Earth’s land surface is desert, and very little of it looks like the movies. What makes a desert is not heat but dryness: so little rain falls that hardly anything can grow. That is why the largest desert on Earth is icy Antarctica, and why the Gobi in Mongolia freezes at minus 40 degrees in winter. The Sahara is the largest hot desert, almost the size of the United States, and was green as recently as 6,000 years ago. The Atacama in Chile is so dry that some weather stations go years without recording rain, which is why observatories stand there. The Namib is considered the oldest desert in the world, with some of the tallest dunes anywhere. On the Arabian Peninsula lies the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand sea. Deserts are also places of records and stories. The highest air temperature was measured in Death Valley in the Mojave, the hottest ground surface in Iran’s Lut. In the Karakum a gas crater nicknamed the “Gates of Hell” has been burning since 1971, and the Silk Road once skirted the Taklamakan. Giant saguaro cacti grow in the Sonoran Desert, and the San people have lived in the Kalahari for thousands of years. Can you recognise the world’s great deserts by their features?
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Sahara
It is almost as large as the United States, and only a small part of it is sand dunes.
💡 Did you know? About 6,000 years ago it was green, with lakes, hippos and crocodiles.
Antarctica
A desert is defined by low precipitation, not heat; the interior receives barely 50 millimetres a year.
💡 Did you know? The lowest air temperature on Earth, minus 89.2 degrees, was measured there.
Atacama
Some weather stations there have recorded no measurable rain for years.
💡 Did you know? Thanks to its clear, dry air, some of the world’s largest telescopes stand there.
Gobi
The expedition was led by the American Roy Chapman Andrews.
💡 Did you know? It is a cold desert: in winter temperatures drop below minus 40 degrees.
Kalahari
It is covered in grass and thorn bushes and home to lions and meerkats.
💡 Did you know? The San are among the oldest cultures of humankind, and their languages use click sounds.
Namib
It has been arid for at least 55 million years, and some of the world’s tallest dunes rise near Sossusvlei.
💡 Did you know? Beetles survive there by collecting fog droplets on their backs.
Rub’ al Khali
It stretches across Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.
💡 Did you know? Briton Wilfred Thesiger crossed it with Bedouin in the 1940s and described it in “Arabian Sands”.
Mojave
The reading is disputed but is still the official world record.
💡 Did you know? Las Vegas lies in this desert too.
Sonora
A saguaro can grow more than 12 metres tall and live about 150 years.
💡 Did you know? The city of Phoenix, Arizona, lies in the middle of this desert.
Thar
It is one of the most densely populated deserts in the world.
💡 Did you know? The yellow sandstone fort of Jaisalmer is known as the “Golden Fort”.
Negev
Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion lived at Kibbutz Sde Boker in this desert and is buried there.
💡 Did you know? Modern drip irrigation spread from a kibbutz there in the 1960s.
Taklamakan
The Silk Road ran in two branches around its edges.
💡 Did you know? Its dunes move, and well-preserved mummies have been found in its sand.
Danakil
The annual average temperature there is above 34 degrees.
💡 Did you know? The skeleton “Lucy”, a human ancestor over three million years old, was found in this region in 1974.
Karakum
The crater near Darvaza was set alight during drilling to burn off toxic gas.
💡 Did you know? The name means “black sand”.
Lut
It was the temperature of the ground, not of the air.
💡 Did you know? Its wind-carved ridges, the kaluts, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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