Table Of ContentATLAS OF THE WORLD’S DESERTS
ATLAS OF THE WORLD’S
DESERTS
Nathaniel Harris
Fitzroy Dearborn
An Imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group
New York • London
© 2003 The Brown Reference Group plc
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This edition first published by
Fitzroy Dearborn, an Imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group 2003
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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PICTURE CREDITS
Art Archive: British Library 139, Musée d’Orsay/Dagli Orti 147; Bruce Coleman Collection: Jen &
Des Bartlett 104, E.Bjurstrom 88, Fred Bruemmer
103, John Cancalosi 90, 99, Bruce Coleman Inc. 87, 120t, 120b, Jules Cowan 117, 76, 82,
M.P.L.Fogden 80b, 84t, 101, Jeff Foott 47b, 78, 81, Tore
Hagman 79, 83, HPH Photography 108, P.Kaya 110, Dr Eckart Pott 80t, 84b, Kim Taylor 97, 98;
Corbis: 20, Tom Bean 155, Richard Cummins 74,
Robert Garvey 159, Raymond Gehman 113, Richard Hamilton-Smith 50, Peter Johnson 48,
Wolfgang Kaehler 144, Steve Kaufman 14, David Lees
133, Charles Lenars 17, Peter Lillie 57, Neil Rabinowitz 47t, Galen Rowell 19, Paul A.Souders 8,
Space Shuttle Endeavor 52, Gordon Whitten 12,
46, Martin Withers 49; Hutchison Library: 53, Dave Brinicombe 25, 172, O.R.Constable 170, H.R.
Dorig 123, Nancy Durrell Mckenna 150, Robert
Francis 126t, Mary Jelliffe 137, 163, Michael Kahn 36, Brian Moser 72, 73, Stephen Pern 59,
Bernard Regent 173, Andre Singer 157, Andrew Sole
177, Isabella Tree 33, 65, Audrey Zvoznikov 62, 63; Image Bank: Harald Sund 142, Jose
Szkodzinski 143; Library of Congress: 184; NHPA: A.N.T.
96, A.N.T./Ern Mainka 94, Anthony Bannister 105, 91, Robert Erwin 111, Pavel German 100,
Daniel Heuclin 95b, 106, Hellio & Van Ingen 95t,
Lady Philippa Scott 85; Robert Hunt Library: 135, Black Star 141; Science Photo Library: Tony
Buxton 55, Bernard Edmaier 42, NASA 18, Sinclair
Stammers 15; South American Pictures: Chris Sharp 127; Still Pictures: Adrian Arbib 37, 154,
Romano Cagnon 182, Chris Caldicott 132, 153,
William Campbell 152, Mark Edwards 178, Xavier Eichaker 92, Michel Gunter 28, 44, John Isaac
171, Emmanuel Jeanjean 23, Klein/Hubert 54,
149, Gerard & Margi Moss 129, Gil Moti 183, Stephen Penn 21, Kevin Schafer 175, Jorgen
Schytte 185, Roland Seitre 22, 109, 126b, 162b, 162t,
VOLTCHEV-UNEP 30, Gunter Ziesler 125; Sylvia Cordaiy Photo Library: Dorothy Burrows 116,
David William Gibbons 121, Gable 181, Johnathan
Smith 168; Travel Ink: Allan Hartley 130.
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Atlas: World Map of Aridity 5
CHAPTER 1 How Deserts Form 7
Atlas: African Deserts 26
CHAPTER 2 Sand, Rock, and Rubble 56
Atlas: Asian Deserts 82
CHAPTER 3 Plants of the Desert 110
CHAPTER 4 Creatures of the Desert 136
Atlas: American Deserts 175
CHAPTER 5 The Desert in History 212
CHAPTER 6 The Modern Desert 238
Atlas: Australia and the Poles 257
CHAPTER 7 Wealth from the Desert 283
CHAPTER 8 Spreading Deserts 303
Glossary 317
Bibliograph 322
Inde 327
Limestone columns rise from the Pinnacle Desert in Western Australia.
The hardened columns, which have been exposed by weathering
in this coastal region, range from only a few centimeters to 5
meters (16 ft.) in height.
Introduction 1
INTRODUCTION
In the Western imagination the word “desert” most often evokes a landscape of endless
gigantic sand dunes, dazzling white under a cloudless hot-blue sky and a blazing sun.
This landscape of the imagination is likely to be empty—deserted—except, perhaps, for a
caravan of nomads and camels that inches slowly across the horizon, or a lone man
stumbling, sun-blackened and sun-parched, through the heat haze. Or there may even be
an emerald-green oasis, where tents are set out in the shade of a palm grove—though this,
of course, may be nothing but a tantalizing mirage. This is the magnificent and exotic
landscape of movies such as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Bernardo
Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), and of countless adventure stories of intrepid
travelers and explorers.
This idealized or classic landscape is not pure fantasy: parts of the Sahara, Arabian,
and other deserts fit quite well with this image—though perhaps with less Technicolor
vibrancy. The stereotype does, however, contain some misleading notions, of which the
most notable is that all deserts are hot, and that heat is crucial in defining what constitutes
a desert. Temperature actually plays a secondary role or no role in such definitions—not
all deserts are hot, and even so-called hot deserts are not hot all the time. The Gobi Desert
deep within Central and East Asia, for example, has relatively cool but erratic
temperatures even in summer and can be brutally cold in winter, and in the Sahara
temperatures can easily plummet to 4°C (39°F) at night. Modern geographers also
recognize the category of the polar desert, applying it to all of Antarctica and parts of the
Arctic (notably Greenland), where temperatures day and night stand at the opposite
extreme to those of daytime hot deserts.
Even a brief perusal of the photographs included in this book will suggest a much more
varied, and even nebulous, notion of what is—or is sometimes—meant by the term
“desert.” There are vast gravel plains, gleaming expanses of sun-baked salt, and rugged,
eroded landscapes of pinnacles, canyons, and rock arches. There are deserts smothered
with flowers and blooming cacti; there are others studded with oil wells or scarred by
quarries. Some are washed by the ocean and bathed in fog, and some are ice-encrusted
polar wildernesses. On e of the surprising facts encountered in this book is that only 20 to
30 percent of the world’s deserts are covered by sand, and that the world’s great deserts
in fact encompass a huge variety of terrains, not only relative to each other but sometimes
within their own boundaries. There is, moreover, little exotic about the desert biome—
almost 20 percent of the earth’s land surface is desert, and there are deserts in almost
every continent and at every latitude. Of the continents only Europe has no desert area.
For many peoples of the world the desert is not a remote fantasy but a reality that
impinges on their everyday lives.
Atlas of the world's deserts 2
Defining the desert
Definitions of the term “desert” are neither static nor absolute. All over the world the
term “desert” and its foreign-language equivalents are culturally and topographically
specific. European words such as “desert,”“desert” and “Wüste” emphasize the sense of
abandonment that is the standard Western response to the desert landscape—an idea that
is also reflected in the etymology of the name of the Namib Desert in southern Africa—
“the place where there is nothing.” Arabic has not one but several words for “desert,”
including erg (applied to large areas of sand or “sand seas”) and hammada (applied to
stony plains), as well as the more general sahra, from whose plural form—sahara—the
world’s largest desert takes its name. The Turkic kum means literally “sand,” reflecting
the sandy wastes of Central Asia—hence the Kara-Kum, or “Black Sand,” of
Turkmenistan and the Kyzyl-Kum, or “Red Sand,” of neighboring Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan—while the Persian dasht means “plain” as well as “desert,” in reference to
the plateau deserts that dominate central Iran.
Physical geographers and geologists must at least attempt to be more scientific in their
definitions of what constitutes a desert, and they have debated and extended the possible
meanings. Today they agree that the key determining factor is aridity, or the lack of
plentiful and consistent rainfall—generally defined as less than 250 millimeters (10 in.)
of annual precipitation. Such a definition extends the meaning of desert well beyond its
traditional confinement to the hot deserts that have so exercised the European
imagination. As Chapter 1 shows, low rainfall is a characteristic not only of the
subtropical regions where most of the hot deserts—the Sahara, Arabian, and Australian
deserts, for example—are located, but also of continental interiors, the western sides of
continents, the leeward side of high mountain ranges, and parts of the Arctic and
Antarctic regions.
Even this definition is by no means watertight; strict definitions always create seeming
anomalies. The Kalahari in southern Africa is labeled a desert in every atlas, and its very
name—meaning “the Great Thirst”—would appear to confirm this status. But most of the
Kalahari receives roughly twice the amount of the annual maximum allowable
precipitation and has a relatively rich vegetation, and therefore for some scholars this
would-be desert falls outside the strict definition of the term. However, more complex
definitions of aridity take into account the rate of evaporation as well as the amount of
precipitation, and the Kalahari, despite its rainfall, has little standing water due to the dry
heat that rapidly evaporates much of the land’s moisture. In their pursuit of exact
definitions, experts ha ve sometimes devised formulas to indicate a particular region’s
“Index of Aridity.” One of the simplest, the Lang Rain Factor, for example, divides the
annual precipitation (in millimeters) by the mean annual temperature (in centigrade).
Other arid regions, while not generally called deserts and often receiving slightly more
than the regulation 250 millimeters (10 in.) of rainfall, display some of the characteristics
of deserts.
Such borderline “semiarid” regions are often covered by the terms “semidesert” or
“drylands.” The Sahel in sub-Saharan Africa is one important area of semidesert. In
recent years this vast region has come under close scrutiny as its poor but locally crucial
