Where is the world's biggest desert?
The world's
largest desert is the great desert of North Africa: the Sahara. "Sahara" in Arabic
means wilderness, in this wilderness stretches right across Africa from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. From east west it covers more than three
thousand miles. So of the Red Sea, desert conditions continue through Saudi Arabia
into Persia.
To calculate the Sahara's breadth
is not so easy. The desert does not simply "stop", and vegetation
begin from that point on. Indeed desert conditions disappear so gradually that
nowhere to the south does it have precise boundaries. Nevertheless, the Sahara
is seldom less than 1000 miles wide, and consequently must have an area
exceeding three million square miles. These enormous dimension make the Sahara
almost as big as the United States, including Alaska.
The Sahara is one of the hottest
regions of the world and, on average, receives only 17 days of rain a year.
When it does rain, delicate herbs and flowers grow rapidly and then disappear
almost as quickly as they came.
Many people think of a desert as
a flat expanse of sand. But in the Sahara their are many mountains, some rising
to 10,000 feet. For part of the year some of these strangely shaped peaks will
even be covered in snow.
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