Largest Deserts of the World

1. The Karakum Desert, also spelled Kara Kum and Gara Gum is a desert in Central Asia. It occupies about 70 percent, or 350,000 km?, of the area of Turkmenistan. Covering much of present day Turkmenistan, the Karakum Desert lies east of the Caspian Sea, with the Aral Sea to the north and the Amu Darya river and the Kyzyl Kum desert to the northeast. In modern times, with the shrinking of the Aral Sea, the extended Aral Karakum has appeared on the f .....

Great Sandy Desert Australia

2. The Great Sandy Desert is a 360,000 km2 (140,000 sq mi) expanse in northwestern Australia. Roughly the same size as Japan, it forms part of a larger desert area known as the Western Desert. The vast region of Western Australia is sparsely populated, without significant settlements. The Great Sandy Desert is a flat area between the rocky ranges of the Pilbara and the Kimberley. To the southeast is the Gibson Desert and to the east is the Tanami D .....

Chihuahuan Desert Mexico

3. The Chihuahuan Desert is a desert that straddles the U.S. Mexico border in the central and northern portions of the Mexican Plateau, bordered on the west by the extensive Sierra Madre Occidental range, and overlaying northern portions of the east range, the Sierra Madre Oriental. On the U.S. side it occupies the valleys and basins of central and southern New Mexico, Texas west of the Pecos River and southeastern Arizona; south of the border, it .....

Great Basin Desert USA

4. The Great Basin is the largest watershed of North America which does not drain to an ocean. Water within the Great Basin evaporates since outward flow is blocked. The basin extends into Mexico and covers most of Nevada and over half of Utah, as well as parts of California, Idaho, Oregon and Wyoming. The majority of the watershed is in the North American Desert ecoregion, but includes areas of the Forested Mountain and Mediterranean California eco .....

Great Victoria Desert Australia

5. The Great Victoria Desert is a barren, arid, and sparsely populated desert ecoregion in southern Australia. It falls inside the states of South Australia and Western Australia and consists of many small sandhills, grasslands and salt lakes. It is over 700 kilometres (430 mi) wide (from west to east) and covers an area of 424,400 square kilometres (163,900 sq mi). The Western Australia Mallee shrub ecoregion lies to the west, the Little Sandy D .....

Patagonia Desert Argentina

6. The Patagonian Desert, also known as the Patagonia Desert or the Patagonian Steppe, is the largest desert in America and is the 7th largest desert in the world by area, occupying 260,000 square miles (673,000 km). It is located primarily in Argentina with small parts in Chile and is bounded by the Andes, to its west, and the Atlantic Ocean to its east, in the region of Patagonia, southern Argentina. The Patagonian Desert is the largest continenta .....

Kalahari Desert Southern Africa

7. The Kalahari Desert is a large arid to semi arid sandy area in Southern Africa extending 900,000 square kilometers (350,000 sq), covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa, as semi desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains. The Kalahari Desert is the southern part of Africa, and the geography is a portion of desert and a plateau. The Kalahari supports some animals and plants because most of it is not a t .....

Gobi Desert Mongolia

8. The Gobi is a large desert region in Asia. It covers parts of northern and northwestern China, and of southern Mongolia. The desert basins of the Gobi are bounded by the Altai Mountains and the grasslands and steppes of Mongolia on the north, by the Hexi Corridor and Tibetan Plateau to the southwest, and by the North China Plain to the southeast. The Gobi is made up of several distinct ecological and geographic regions based on variations in cli .....

Arabian Desert peninsula

9. Arabian Desert or Eastern Desert, c.86,000 sq mi (222,740 sq km), E Egypt, bordered by the Nile valley in the west and the Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez in the east. It extends along most of Egypts eastern border and merges into the Nubian Desert in the south. The Arabian Desert is sparsely populated; most of its inhabitants are based around wells and springs. Today most of the desert can be accessed by roads. Since ancient times Egypt has used th .....

Sahara Desert North Africa

10. The Sahara is the worlds largest desert. At over 9,000,000 square kilometers (3,500,000 sq mi), it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as the United States or the continent of Europe. The desert stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean. To the south, it is delimited by the Sahel: a belt of semi arid tropical savanna that comprises the northern region of c .....

Syrian Desert

11. The Syrian Desert is described as an arid wasteland by Merriam Webster. Covering much of Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, the region is marked by lava flows and was an impenetrable barrier to humans until recent decades. Now, highways and oil pipelines cross the region, which receives less than 5 inches (125 mm) of rain annually, on average.Humans were able to reach parts of it in ancient times, though. One area, now dubbed Syrias Stoneheng .....

Antarctica

12. Nestled around the South Pole, where the coldest temperature on Earth was recorded and which doesnt receive sunlight for months every year, its sometimes hard to think of icy Antarctica as a desert. But it is the worlds largest one because very little precipitation falls there on average, it gets less than 2 inches (50 millimeters) a year, mostly as snow.Despite the low snowfall, vast glaciers cover 99 percent of Antarcticas surface. Thats bec .....

Mojave Desert

13. The Mojave Desert is a desert that occupies a significant portion of southeastern California and smaller parts of central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona in the United States. The term Mojave originates from the Spanish language while the spelling Mohave comes from modern English. Both are used today, although the Native American Tribe officially uses the spelling Mojave; the word is a shortened form of Ha .....

Namib Desert

14. The Namib is a coastal desert in southern Africa. The name Namib is of Nama origin and means vast place. According to the broadest definition, the Namib stretches for more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) along the Atlantic coasts of Angola, Namibia, and South Africa, extending southward from the Carunjamba River in Angola, through Namibia and to the Olifants River in Western Cape, South Africa.The Namibs northernmost portion, which extends 450 k .....

Dasht e Kavir

15. Dasht e Kavir also known as Kavir e Namak and the Great Salt Desert is a large desert lying in the middle of the Iranian plateau. It is about 800 km (500 mi) and 320 km (200 mi) with a total surface area of about 77,600 km2 (30,000 sq mi), making it the Earths 23rd largest desert.The area of this desert stretches from the Alborz mountain range in the north west to the Dasht e Lut in the south east and is partitioned between the Iranian provinces .....

Dasht e Lut

16. Iran is climatically part of the Afro Asian belt of deserts, which stretches from the Cape Verde islands off West Africa all the way to Mongolia near Beijing, China. The patchy, elongated, light colored feature in the foreground (parallel to the mountain range) is the northernmost of the Dasht dry lakes that stretch southward 300 kilometers (190 mi). In near tropical deserts, elevated areas capture most precipitation. As a result, the desert is l .....

Atacama Desert

17. The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a plateau in South America, covering a 1,000 kilometre (600 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. It is the driest non polar desert in the world. According to estimates the Atacama Desert proper occupies 105,000 square kilometres (41,000 sq mi), but its size rises to 128,000 square kilometres (49,000 sq mi) when the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. M .....

Simpson Desert

18. The Simpson Desert is a large area of dry, red sandy plain and dunes in Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland in central Australia.It is the fourth largest Australian desert, with an area of 176,500 km? (68,100 sq mi) and is the worlds largest sand dune desert.The desert is underlain by the Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest inland drainage areas in the world. Water from the basin rises to the surface at numerous natural spring .....

Thar Desert

19. The Thar Desert is a large, arid region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent and forms a natural boundary running along the border between India and Pakistan. With an area of more than 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi), within the Indian state of Rajasthan, covering the districts of Jaisalmer, Barmer, Bikaner and Jodhpur, and some region of the states of Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat.it is the worlds 9th largest subtropical desert.Thar Dese .....

Gibson Desert

20. The Gibson Desert, an interim Australian bioregion, covers a large dry area in the state of Western Australia and is still largely in an almost pristine state. It is about 155,000 square kilometres (60,000 .....

Taklamakan Desert

21. The Taklamakan Desert, also known as Taklimakan and Teklimakan, is a desert in southwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwest China. It is bounded by the Kunlun Mountains to the south, the Pamir Mountains and Tian Shan (ancient Mount Imeon) to the west and north, and the Gobi Desert to the east.The name may be an Uyghur borrowing of the Arabic tark, to leave alone/out/behind, relinquish, abandon + makan, place. Another plausible explanati .....

Sonoran Desert

22. The Sonoran Desert is a North American desert which covers large parts of the Southwestern United States in Arizona and California, and of Northwestern Mexico in Sonora, Baja California and Baja California Sur. It is the hottest desert in North America, with an area of 280,000 square kilometers (110,000 sq mi). The western portion of the United States Mexico border passes through the Sonoran Desert.In phytogeography, the Sonoran Desert is within .....

Colorado Plateau

23. The Colorado Plateau, also known as the Colorado Plateau Province, is a physiographic region of the Intermontane Plateaus, roughly centered on the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. The province covers an area of 337,000 km2 (130,000 mi2) within western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, southern and eastern Utah, and northern Arizona. About 90% of the area is drained by the Colorado River and its main tributaries: the Green, .....

Karakum Desert

24. The Karakum Desert, also spelled Kara Kum and Gara Gum (Turkmen: Garagum, Russian: ????????, Kazakh: ???????) is a desert in Central Asia. Its name means Black Sand in Turkic languages. It occupies about 70 percent, or 350,000 km?, of the area of Turkmenistan.The population is sparse, with an average of one person per 6.5 km? (one person per 2.5 square miles). Rainfall is equally sparse, ranging from 70 to 150 mm.Covering much of present day Turk .....