The Gobi Desert is the fifth biggest desert in the world and the biggest in Asia. It is located in China/Mongolia and it has a huge climate difference: in winter it is -40 degrees Celsius, in Summer, 50+ degrees Celsius. To add on to that it is 1,295,000 km² in area. Being a desert, it has very few mm of rain each year. To be precise, 194mm of rain hits the Gobi every year on average. Most of the rain comes in summer. When
it rains in Winter, this often falls as snow up near Ulaanbaatar, yet in summer, the
temperatures boil down near Beijing. In 24 hours, the temperature can
go up or down 35 degrees Celsius.
Sometimes monsoons hit the southeast Gobi, but they are usually
converted into icy sandstorms and snowstorms, and ferocious winds from
Siberia (the Anti-Cyclone) make this region actually rather dry. Not all of the Gobi is sandy, but actually most of it is rocky. It has several Chinese names and stretches from the Pamirs to the Great Khingan mountains at the Manchuria border. To the south is the Tibetan Plateau. Around Lop Nur and Hami, the Gobi becomes the Takla Makan desert. This desert is not considered part of the Gobi nowadays. The Gobi, believe it or not, is archaeologist heaven. The desert is full of life and holds many treasures. It is home to some of the earliest dinosaur fossils in record and also fossil dinosaur eggs. Some of the toughest species and the rarest too live in the Gobi Desert, especially the Bactrian Camel. To survive such extreme temperature changes, Bactrian Camels must eat small amounts of snow regularly, until they find an oasis to drink from. If they eat too much snow, they might freeze. Bactrian Camels are some of the rarest and toughest camels in the world. They have 2 humps and are some of the biggest camels, being from 300 to 1000 kilograms heavy. Another regular of the Gobi is the black-tailed Gazelle. They are quite endangered as many were killed 6,000 years ago, and some still are hunted. The vulnerable Marbled Polecat also lives in the desert, as does, the highly poached Mongolian Wild Ass and finally Sandplover birds. The lovely Snow Leopard, a big cat with no roar, but a huge pounce, visits the Gobi from time to time. These endangered creatures are 25 to 75kg and they eat ibex and goats. The Brown Bear and the Gray Wolf also visit the Gobi. Only a few shrubs survive in the Gobi, notably Needle Grass, Bridlegrass, Grey Sparrow's Saltwort and the grey sagebrush. There are only a few nature reserves in the Gobi (Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, Great Gobi A and B Strictly protected areas) so most of it is wild, but there are more reserves than some other deserts have! Livestock ruin land by trampling it, yet there are very few people in the Gobi. There are huge copper and gold mines in the Gobi, at Oyuu Tolgoi, Mongolia. They produce 450,000 tonnes of copper and 330,000 ounces of gold from the soil. The mine should last for the next 50 years, if the Mongolian government don't close it, which they are thinking of doing. On the south of the Gobi in China is where the Gobi is mostly expanding. Every year, 3,600 km2 of China is added onto the Gobi desert's land. Deforestation and overgrazing are the main causes of expansion. The 'Green Wall Of China' act plants many trees around the Gobi as a barrier. In Mongolia it is not so much a problem. The Gobi is divided into 5 sub-deserts or regions, not including Takla Makan desert: The Eastern Gobi Desert Steppe, the Alashan Plateau Semi-Desert, the Gobi Lakes Valley Desert Steppe, the Dzungarian Basin Semi-Desert and the Tian Shan Range. These are the European explorers who traveled in the Gobi up to 1911:
The map below will help you see where these places are.
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